Blindness, complex and syndrome

Every Sunday morning I take out my tweezers and hand mirror to pluck my upper lip and glabella. It's a weekly ritual to ensure I don't walk around with a mustache or a unibrow. This week I skipped this ritual and I'm sat with some thick hairs on my upper lip which I'm pretty ashamed of. Nonetheless, I'm trying to conquer this shame that has its roots in being called names for having a unibrow and darker, thicker upper lip hair than my peers. I don't blame these children for doing so. In Western media characters with unibrows are often depicted as undesirable and of criminal nature. Besides that, women in the 2000s wanted very thin eyebrows and mine were, and still are, the complete opposite of that. It did cause me to shave my right eyebrow off completely when I was seven years old. Luckily my mother stopped me just in time or the other one would have been gone as well (and I would have left myself looking like a thumb). About the stache, I just think most children hadn't seen darker upper lip hair on other women before, with maybe their grandmothers being the one exception. As children get older, they get to learn more about the everchanging world and Frida Kahlo was one of the people they learned about to start mocking me a bit less.

Vanity by Auguste Toulmouche (1889)

Frida Kahlo, the Mexican painter, always comes up in conversations about my facial features (read: facial hair). For those who aren't familiar with her looks: she was very proud of her unibrow and upper lip hair and didn't shy away from depicting them in her self-portraits. "I won't curb my self-expression to meet your expectations of how a woman should look" is what she famously said. Though these words are very inspiring, I still can't put down the tweezers and let my facial hair run wild and free. The reason for this is that I feel like they might be distracting people from the rest of my face. Also, because I don't want to give the impression of being ungroomed. As a person of foreign descent (I can't say person of color since the U.S. doesn't consider me one) you can get labelled as unhygienic or dirty for some practices like putting oil in your hair, always having your hair in protective updo's or having henna tattoos. I still remember how people would ask me whether I brushed my hair, why I didn't let it down or whether I was wearing ... a wig (just pull yourself together). A decade after I started my flat iron era and wearing my hair down, the "clean girl" aesthetic started popping up and those slick buns gave me a visceral reaction. It reminded me of how I needed to sit still every morning so my mother could tame my mane which hurt so much. Afterwards I would end up with braids or a bun that would give my tween self an unnecessary facelift and such a headache.

Young Woman at the Mirror by Berthe Morisot (1880)

The "clean girl" aesthetic wasn't the first time one of my complexes got flipped upside down. In the mid 2010s, we got the thick eyebrows coming in style (thank you, Cara Delevingne and Lily Collins) and everybody's eyebrows were "on fleek." A lot of girls would ask me for my eyebrow routine, but they were so disappointed to learn that I don't use makeup and that these caterpillars brows are all natural. Of course, it was very confusing to see the pendulum swing from thin eyebrows to thick exaggerated ones. This made me realize that I should be happy I never plucked them to be thinner, because I would be wanting the polar opposite a couple years later. This is why makeup lovers are currently discussing their eyebrow blindness on social media (mainly to mock the "old look"). I think this is the start of people realizing how everybody jumping on a bandwagon might lead to regrets afterwards. I hope that over the coming years topics like this will continue to pop as people will realize more and more how they have been influenced to achieve a certain look. The most unhealthy one is still the "Instagram face", where people try to achieve to look like their FaceTune selves through plastic surgery. I think it's quite obvious that this is very unhealthy and will lead to heavy body dysmorphia.

Woman before the Mirror by Ellen Emmet Rand (1925)

Coming to terms with accepting my own looks instead of changing it all to adhere to what's considered in fashion was quite the epiphany. It has lead me to treat the face I see in the mirror with a bit more respect than I used to. I'm never going to shame people for following fashion or beauty trends: to some, it's just a lot of fun and why should I take that away from them. Even though, it's nigh impossible, I will always aspire to be a timeless being (my balletcore sneakers are side-eying me bombastically). This is why I almost never have any technology in my photos, with my beautiful rectangular phone that could be an iPhone 5C or an iPhone 15 - who could tell? - being the one exception. 

Thank you, and take care.