When I was thirteen years old, I shaved off my eyebrows.
I will spare you the not-entirely-believable details of how I came to be standing in front of my parents’ bathroom mirror with my father’s razor and a can of shaving cream, suffice to say that, once there, it quickly became apparent to me that one of my eyebrows was longer than the other. Not too much longer, obviously, but long enough to be noticeable.
Being, even then, rather vain, I wasn’t having a bar of this, and so raised the razor to my forehead and earnestly set to work.
It goes without saying that an adjustment to one eyebrow inevitably led to an adjustment of the other, the two of them getting shorter and shorter as I tried to strike a balance. Eventually, when both had been reduced to half their original size, I decided I’d passed the point of no return. With two swift strokes, balance was no longer an issue.
Nervous about what people might say, especially at school, I decided the best course of action would be to not tell anyone. My eyebrows had always been light, after all, and there was a chance that no one would notice they were missing. My plan worked well for all of two hours, before my father, staring at me incredulously across the dinner table, finally couldn’t help himself.
“What happened to your eyebrows?” he asked. “What are you, moulting? You look like the Mona Lisa.”
I am not one of those people naturally blessed with good looks. While I don’t exactly blame my parents for this, I rather wish that their less-desirable genes hadn’t all been flushed out on the first pass, resulting in a weak, anaemic-looking eldest, while the three sons that followed were tanned and toned, cut from some much handsomer cloth.
Clearly, mine is a vanity that has been born of a sense of inadequacy. Of course, it is arguable that vanity always is. Unlike pride or even arrogance, vanity is always first and foremost a kind of overcompensation.
“There are no grades of vanity,” Mark Twain once wrote, “only grades of ability in concealing it.”
As my run-in with the razor might suggest, for me concealing it has always been the problem, mainly because it has a way of backfiring and taking on highly visible, highly ridiculous manifestations.
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Recently, my hair started changing colour, turning over the course of two weeks from brown to a kind of light auburn. At first I only seemed to notice this under certain types of light, easily dismissing the change in hue as an optical illusion. Then I wondered if it might be my body’s way of getting into the spirit of autumn. My long-suffering mother, who has had to put up with my absurd speculations far more than is anyone’s due, was sceptical.
“You’re being wilfully delusional,” she told me. “Your hair doesn’t just change colour.”
But mine continued to, rapidly. From auburn, my eyebrows turned to marmalade; from marmalade, to mustard yellow. To make matters worse, my fringe and the roots on my forehead were beginning to turn as well, and I was beginning to get worried. Nothing scares the vain man more than the spontaneous whims of his body, especially when they begin to outstrip his capacity to micro-manage them.
I pondered all this one morning as I ran through my daily facial routine. Exfoliant, toner, moisturiser, face wipes. The latter of these were new to the routine, having been added to combat a recent breakout.
I had thus far been quietly impressed by the results. You know, I thought that morning in the bathroom, I am actually very handsome. But as I wiped a wipe across my forehead, it suddenly occurred to me that the breakthrough pimple-fighting formula was slowly dripping down into my eyebrows. I froze. Hadn’t they begun to change colour around the time I started using the face wipes?
I picked up the tub and pored over the label, quickly discovering what I had assumed I might. The active ingredient in the face wipes was hydrogen peroxide. In the interest of having an unblemished face, I had unwittingly been bleaching my eyebrows. Vanity, once again, had cut itself off at the pass.
I picked up the phone and called my mother. “You’re not going to believe what I’ve done to my eyebrows,” I said.
“Your eyebrows?” I could hear the disappointment in her voice. “Why can’t you just leave the damned razor alone?”
The Australian, 8 June 2009
