My Eyebrows and Other Signs of Aging

I feel that I need to document what’s going on with my aging face. Not for nothin’.  Just to make a record. (I am prone to do that kind of thing.)

I’ll start with my eyebrows. In brief…they seem to have developed a mind of their own. The individual little hairlies no longer grow upward and toward the sides of my face, creating a nice arch. In truth, I can no longer call them little hairlies. They’re long and they’re coarse. They’re also sparse, so removing even one of them leaves a noticeable bald space. Moreover, a small minority of them are white. And this is not to say that these hairlies are necessarily growing out white from the root because on more than one occasion, I have plucked a hairlie whose proximal half is white and whose distal half is dark brown! How is that possible? Go figure. Some hairlies, however, are entirely white, stem to stern.

As to the direction of growth…this is totally up for grabs. Not only do they point north, south, east, and west, but also straight outward! I mean, they point frontwards…like my nose or something. If I tweezed out every errant hairlie that was not contributing to an arch, I would have no remaining eyebrow. And speaking of tweezing, these front-pointing hairlies are extremely difficult to grasp because of course they’re on a different plane from simply up/down/left/right, and even gazing into my super-duper magnifying mirror does not make it any easier to grab one. (Something having to do with depth perception.) They say that eyebrows frame one’s face. What does that mean? I don’t know.

While I’m on the topic of hairlies, I might as well mention the changes with my eyelashes. I’ve never had long, lush, curly eyelashes, but at least my short, stubby upper lashes swooped frontward. Now they’re swooping inward…like toward my nose! I hate that. No amount of coaxing will change their inward direction except maybe temporarily fixing them in place with some stiff mascara.

Plenty more is going on with my aging face, but I’m suddenly feeling kind of despondent and will end the documentation of the changes with this discussion of my eyebrows and eyelashes. Lips and skin can wait for another time. Even so, I am already contemplating paragraphs on common skin topics such as:  fine wrinkles, deep wrinkles, creases, furrows, ditches, frown lines, laugh lines, dryness, oiliness, spots and discolorations, pimple scars, large pores, sagging, drooping, jowls, and gravity (which I am sure is the reason that my cheek mole is a half inch lower than its previous location 10 years ago).

If there is any doubt or confusion about my eyebrows, just picture Andy Rooney. Remember him? Or Henry Kissinger. Who could forget him? There was a guy who could raise plenty of eyebrows in his day.