On Dyeing My Eyebrows and Traumatizing My Loved Ones

You'd think I'd gotten a tattoo of Justin Bieber or the smiling poop emoji across my forehead. It was one of those cartoonish scenarios where they shrieked in fear, and that scared a panicked yelp out of me because I didn't know what was wrong, and we just stood there looking at each other, wide-eyed and gibbering. All I'd done was dye my eyebrows, and people were freaking the hell out.

Is that too strong a description of the situation? I don't think so. At my roommate's birthday party a few months back, some college friends who don't work in fashion — they work in finance, in fact, which I hear is the polar opposite of a culture in which people roll into the office adorned in various paints and pigments — spent about five minutes examining my new eyebrows with a mix of fascination and unease. That's a long time for most 25-year-old guys, I think.

Here's the story: I'm a pale blonde with pale brows. On a good day, it's sort of an alien, Tilda Swinton vibe. (I take "alien" as a compliment; if you disagree, now would be the time to Google David Bowie circa "Ziggy Stardust.") On a very bad day, I look like a potato. The most accurate description I can give is that I look like one of those girls patiently standing at the window in a Vermeer painting, which isn't a terrible thing, but it's not the sexiest reference point either. I recognize that this owes mostly to the milkmaid outfits.

So, to mix things up and because applying brow pencil in the morning cuts into my sleep, I'd taken up tinting my brows a few shades darker than their natural hue every few weeks, using men's beard dye. (It's formulated for the face, friends.) As you may have heard from the Internet or any magazine published since 2012, a well-defined brow reshapes your face entirely. Sort of refocuses your features, as though they might drift apart in a haze otherwise.

When I called up Victoria Gheorghias, the senior eyebrow and waxing specialist at Fekkai's 5th Avenue salon, she explained that a person's hair color, brow color and skin tone all need to vibe against each other correctly — an intimidatingly unscientific-sounding process that may require a trip to the professionals if you're up for it. For blondes and those with graying brows, dyeing makes you look younger (win) and reduces the amount of makeup that you'll wind up using (double win). Blondes, Gheorghias went on, "basically need darker eyebrows than their hair color." So, basically, this blonde was doing everything right.