Ever since I was a teenage boy I've obsessed about my eyebrows. At the time I saw thick male eyebrows as boorish or brutish looking...... certainly not a feature I wanted to be prominent on my face! But during adolescence I noted that mine were getting thicker and thicker.
At A Glance Author Mythology Contact misfitnurse@hotmail.com IAM Mythology When It just happened Artist Aaron Studio Golden Rule Body Piercing-Tattoo Location Silverdale,WA Not only were they getting more prominent and darker, they also were growing together! Today don't we refer to that as a monobrow? At the time I was literally horrified. So at age 17 I got up the courage to pluck all those bristly hairs that were growing between my eyebrows. Actually the courage was needed to face my parents, who were conservative North Carolina folk. I just knew they would notice right away, but it took a week or so.
Amazingly they weren't that upset with me, even though my mother rolled her eyes and called me a "sissy". My dad was characteristically silent about it. It's hard to believe in this day and age of metrosexuality, as young men typically trim their eyebrows and some even shape them a la Liz Taylor, that my eyebrows would have been such a big deal! But remember, this was 1972.
Since I got away with eliminating the ever so dreadful monobrow, I decided it was time to trim my eyebrows. This was a risky step as my parents were always on the lookout for signs of me being gay (of course I was already out as a gay man at the time—hee hee) I had been surreptitously spying on my mom as she plucked and shaped her brows, to learn how to do it. So I knew it was time for me to take the full plunge.
Remember I'm still living at home, age 17, 1972. But I bit the bullet and shaped my brows one day.....and both parents noticed the same day! They yelled at me, accused me of being an embarrassment, and ordered me to never do it again! But the genie was already out of the bottle, and my interest in my eyebrows became a life-long obsession...
Through my 20's, 30's, 40's I've always shaped my brows and plucked the stubborn hair between them. Not like Joan Crawford or anything, I just kept 'em trimmed and neat. Then in my late 40's the meterosexual movement started, and I became "normal"...hee hee! Of course I've never had any desire to be "normal" anyway.
I moved to Seattle in 1995 and was startled to see all the people with facial piercings. I had seen a little of it on TV, but never in person. A cute neighbor (in Seattle) even had his eyebrow pierced! Of course I was totally captivated. And of course I wanted one, too. But my partner at the time said "please don't" and I put it off for a while. But this piercing was for me, a logical next step in my quest for the perfect eyebrows. Plus it looked sexy!
I walked to work at the time, and everyday passed a body piercing shop. It had an enormous window and the inside looked so exotic, with African masks hanging on the wall. I always wanted to go in, but was a little scared that I would actually go through with the piercing. And my cute neighbor kept urging me to do it......so one day I did it, got a 16 ga eyebrow piercing with a straight barbell, and loved it! My cute neighbor loved it, too. But I never saw him after that; he moved or something.
As time went on I had multiple facial piercings that failed---upper ear cartilage, tragus, septum, but my eyebrow piercing remained healthy and wonderful. I eventually went to a 14 ga, and recently had changed the jewelry to a little spike.
After joining bme, and seeing all the fantabulous piercings, I was highly inspired and motivated to further my eyebrow piercing. So last night I went back to Aaron at Golden Rule in Silverdale,WA (who did my recent Tragus) He punched a new deep 10 ga beside my existing eyebrow piercing, and stretched the existing one to 10 ga as well.
The new 10 ga punch was wicked. Aaron went pretty deep, and the searing pain was intense for a couple seconds. Of course a few seconds after that, the delicious endorphins bathed my brain. What a bath it was-----similar to being in a claw-foot tub filled with warm water and fine oil with your eyes closed. My whole body reacted beautifully and I was enthralled for quite a while afterward.
I chose circular stainless steel barbells with extra large beads (in 10 ga), and these are perhaps the raddest piercings I've ever had. The jewelry going in was pretty intense, too. They sit side by side and they feel terrific. The first time I looked in the mirror they looked almost savage! A metal face was staring back at me, and it was a pleasant image.
Just think, from a fastidious teenager with a proclivity to keep my eyebrows looking nice, to a grown man with big hunks of metal in my eyebrow, I still think eyebrows are quite deserved of aesthetic attention.