HAIRY SITUATION

OUR PANDEMIC EYEBROWS ARE FRUSTRATING. ASHLEY FETTERS WONDERS WHETHER WE CAN LEARN TO LOVE THEM WHILE STAYING AT HOME.

It didn't take long for Brook Schlosser to pick up on the fact that her clients had started to go a little nuts. The Brow Studio in southwest Minneapolis is Schlosser's salon for eyebrow waxing, threading and tinting. When it temporarily closed at the start of the pandemic, she began fielding anguished calls and messages from her regulars: Their eyebrows were starting to grow back in. Little hairs poked well outside their preferred brow shapes, taunting them like pesky weeds sprouting at the perimeters of otherwise well-tended gardens. What were they to do?

Schlosser sold some of them a stay-at-home brow kit: clear gel, a brow pencil and some highlighter. Mostly, though, she talked her customers back from the ledge — the ledge of the bathroom sink. Lest the clients ruin their brows in ways that would take months of regrowth to undo. She recalled, “We were telling people, `Put your tweezers down. Don't touch.'”

The Brow Studio reopened in June, and “all summer long, it was just brows, brows, brows,” Schlosser said. She and her staff had to work six days a week to keep up with demand.

That avalanche of business came after just 10 weeks of closure. But across the U.S., many who depend on brow-care services have now stayed away for more than 10 months.

Ever since “aerosolized droplets” became a household phrase, the idea of going for brow-maintenance appointments has become unnerving to some: The technician's and the client's faces tend to be close enough to smell lunch on each other's breath, sometimes for upward of 15 minutes at a time. Given that brows have become a higher-profile beauty priority (and a bigger business) in recent years, it's been a painfully long separation for clients and providers alike.

For many, the Year of Pandemic Brows will have shortterm effects: a brief, frenzied bout of brow-dysmorphic self-disgust. It may also, however, have consequences for how our brows look for years to come.

Reader, I can relate: After watching my brows fan out wide and wispy after weeks without waxing, I caved and bought some German wax strips at the drugstore. I was delighted with the results at first, but seconds later I was horrified. For a month I lived under a Good Brow/Bad Brow diarchy of terror. Although I eventually regained enough courage and hair to try it again, with slightly better results, the process still sparked a few nightmarish flashbacks.

This may seem like a case of vanity run amok. But the effects when a person loses control of their appearance can be profound.

As Vivian Diller, a New York-based psychologist and the co-author of the book Face It: What Women Really Feel as Their Looks Change and What to Do About It, explained, “When our hair, nails and skin look good, it makes us feel good. It's similar to when our doctor reports that our heart and lungs are in good shape, we tend to breathe more easily. When we appear healthier, we feel more relaxed, stronger and more confident.”

When self-care routines can't take place as usual, people often replace them with makeshift versions. Natalia Lehotska, owner of Brow Rehab in Miami Beach, Fla., said she's seen this phenomenon firsthand. When the world is scary and people are stuck at home, bored, getting on each other's nerves and craving normalcy, “they start plucking.”

Not everyone is upset, though, about brows getting more voluptuous. Brow stylists are delighted.

Schlosser was pleasantly surprised to see some clients return over the summer with brows that looked a little less unnaturally thin than usual. Lehotska, too, was elated. “By the time we reopened and some of the customers came back, I had these gorgeous, phenomenal, bushy eyebrows to work with,” she said. “I was, like, popping champagne.”

For women, who make up the vast majority of professional eyebrow-service clients, societal messaging indicates that there are two categories of body hair: “control and minimize” (legs, armpits, upper lip, bikini line) and “groom, style and emphasize” (head, and … historically, that's been about it). It's only in the past half-decade or so that eyebrows moved from the control category to the grooming one.

“You couldn't just be a brow specialist, like, 10 years ago,” said one of them, Jimena Garcia, who's based in New York and Los Angeles. In 2019, Garcia was named Chanel's first official brow expert.

In that time, women have begun to wear their brows thicker and darker than in generations past, in part thanks to bold-browed celebrities like Cara Delevingne and Lily Collins. Still, some of the obsessive elimination tendencies that characterized the old philosophy (for example, threading or waxing multiple times per month, or tweezing every stray the moment it appears) have hung on.

To Garcia, the present predicament seems like a great opportunity for people to reset their relationships with their brows — to let them grow free and unruly now, and develop new, lower-maintenance routines in the long term.

To live through a pandemic, after all, is to surrender control before regaining it, she pointed out. Over the next few years, then, our brows could end up looking the way we'll likely feel as we re-enter the world: polished at surface level, but transformed underneath.

“Look: The planet healed while this pandemic was happening,” Lehotska said. Lockdowns reduced everything from air pollution to roadkill.

“How about we also take this time to give our bodies a break?”

WE WERE TELLING PEOPLE, `PUT YOUR TWEEZERS DOWN. DON'T

TOUCH.'

GETTY IMAGES / ISTOCKPHOTO With salons closed in many cities during the pandemic, some are taking eyebrow care into their own hands.