Sometimes it's best to leave well enough alone – especially when it concerns your eyebrows and results in your spouse laughing so hard that her legs buckle.
Yes, Mrs. Brad laughed at me. Again.
It started a few weeks ago when I spotted a few renegade gray eyebrows growing straight out, like a unicorn's horn. If you don't have gray hair, you may not realize this, but gray hair is courser and straighter than your natural color.
At least mine is. And it's especially obvious in my eyebrows. (An aside: The outside one-third of my eyebrows are wispy and nearly blonde, giving me a Muppet appearance. So I'm already eyebrow-challenged.)
On the day in question, I did what I've taken to doing in recent years when I see the random albino unicorn eyebrow hair: I get Mrs. Brad's tweezers and pull out the offending strand. I should note that I don't pull out all the gray hair – I don't want to look like Martin Scorsese, who has black eyebrows and gray hair. I just want the protruding locks removed.
So I plucked. But eyebrow hairs are thin, so I missed and pulled out an adjacent hair. (Note: It hurts. Not like plucking nose hairs would feel, but it hurts. I understand why women might choose to stop plucking their eyebrows and instead do whatever it is that they do – despite having three sisters and being married for 30-plus years, makeup is still a mystery to me.)
Anyway, the albino unicorn eyebrow hair remained, so I plucked again. And again. The gray hair spot looked bigger! So plucked again. And again.
I stood back.
Better.
Until I looked closer.
It was worse. I had a large white spot on my eyebrow.
It wasn't from gray hairs. It was pale, sun-protected skin showing through. I had plucked a bald spot in my left eyebrow!
It wasn't noticeable, I told myself. I wear glasses, so the spot was hidden behind my frames. At least that's my story.
I was guilty of the mature version of what nearly every kid does, when they cut their own hair and keep making adjustments until they look like Mo Howard from the Three Stooges. I tried to remove a renegade eyebrow hair and wound up with a white skin patch.
When I told Mrs. Brad the story, she listened intently. She didn't know where it was going. Perhaps she thought it was a confession of how I broke her tweezers.
When I got to the end and showed her the bald spot, she laughed so hard that she had to sit down. And wheeze. As always, she told me that these things only happen to me.
I disagree. I'm sure this has happened to someone else.
It's like actor Jack Black once said: "You must never underestimate the power of the eyebrow."
If only I'd thought of that before plucking.
Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@hotmail.com.
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