LEAVE MY EYEBROW HAIR ALONE

and other thoughts on aging

Photo by Eduardo Gorghetto on Unsplash

A few years ago, the top inner corner of my left eyebrow sprouted a rouge, white hair. It was longer than the rest and 1/4-inch off the brow line. I left it.

Both my sister and my tween daughter regularly pointed it out, reaching up to pluck it before I swatted their hands away. My sister mentioned it again on another visit as if I might have missed it the first time— or all the times I have looked in the mirror each week.

To be fair, I’m not much for facial grooming. I haven’t waxed any part of my face since college, and besides tweaking a few unruly things, my eyebrows are au natural. Once, I noticed several giant black chin hairs on my most glamorous friend, one publicly regarded as polished and beautiful. I realized all women fight an uphill battle against perfectionism. Human bodies have quirks. We can survive them—even love them.

It’s true that I’m blondish; I don’t know what it’s like to have a wooly bear grow on my upper lip. I don’t have deeply curly leg hair or warts on my skin. Still, I have learned to live with stretchmarks (from growing and then later losing weight quickly as a young tween), random sports scars on my legs, cooking burns (those do eventually fade), and other marks of living you’d never see celebrated in a perfume ad in Vogue.

Refusing to pluck my eyebrow hair, though, isn’t a quiet rebellion against the beauty industry. It feels deeper and more meaningful.

This hair is my alicorn, my magic fairy hair—something mystical and witchy in my otherwise (outwardly) mainstream existence. It's like finding a Magnolia blossom tucked into a fallen tree, deep in the woods, and you can’t be sure if it was humans or fairies who put it there.

Furthermore, it is mine. I can do with it as I please.

My friend Mel has had a giant white streak in her thick, black hair; it’s been there as long as I’ve known her when we were both in our early twenties. Mel is deeply artistic, a wizard with flowers, fashion, and interior design. I can’t imagine how different she’d seem to me if she’d dyed her whole head black all these years.

There are white hairs on my head, too. I noticed the very first one in an airport in Reykjavik. I’d flown there to meet a dear friend for her 40th birthday. I plucked it out, wirey and tough, standing straight up among my otherwise flaxen hair. A year later, I cut a few more out, one by one (a mistake; they grow back). These days, they hide under a hat, which I’d wear anyway. Either way, they keep growing.

I love my grey head hair less than that singular hair in my eyebrow. Still, upon leaving the doctor yesterday, I saw a woman with long silver-white hair fashioned in a high top knot, her casual knits draping over stylish sneakers, and her well-toned physique. Behind her trailed a dishy, fully-grey gentleman. They were both in their mid-70s, dripping with style.

What had they weathered together? What concessions? What surrender (what news at the doctor that day?) And yet, not all surrender. In their eyes, I saw triumph. Here they are, striding through life, foxy and upright—and together.

I want to be them, I thought—one day.

I’m not the first to write about aging gracefully. There’s little to add to the conversation that hasn’t been said. Yet, we need to keep wondering—sometimes aloud—if the white hairs and wrinkles come to us talismans, slowly at first, here for us to cherish, not to banish. They are, after all, triumphs of another kind.

To my small, beloved group reading here, spend some minutes this weekend writing a love letter to your talisman, your alicorn—the thing you won’t let anyone touch. The stretch marks that appeared while nursing your firstborn, the C-section scar from safely birthing twins, the noticeably smaller breast, the odd little bump on your right wrist, the way your left eye swoops slightly lower than your right.

Fold up your letter to the slightly witchy, unconventionally beautiful trait that is so magnificently you—and from now on, wear it proudly.

xxS