Pulled from the oh-no-she-didn’t files of American letters, I bring you this short item on unibrows from the “Dear Prudence” advice column over at Slate. The scenario: mother writes in complaining that her “smart, pretty, and fun” 7-year-old has inherited her “Hispanic” father’s hirsute genes. This was less of problem when said tyke was younger, but now as she is coming into the full flower of her 7-year-old womanhood, mom is “shocked to see that her coarse eyebrows are starting to grow together—downy hairs are appearing across the bridge of her nose.” This, mother says, “bothers” her.
Is that so wrong?
Prudence (not prudent) does, in her defense, tell mother it’s probably best to do nothing about her daughter’s scarlet brown letter of shame … for now. As to the future, all bets are off, ladies and gentlemen, and it’s open season depilatory-style:
Today a little girl with a brow like Bert the Muppet can have it transformed almost instantly into something more like Brooke Shields. This article [in the New York Times] describes the growing trend for getting young girls with moustaches and heavy brows zapped with a cosmetic laser.
Ah, Prudence, you are a veritable font of useless, possibly traumatizing, potentially actionable wisdom.