Never in my wildest dreams did I think I’d be writing about facial hair, and not the soft peach fuzz we all have, but the kind of hair women end up hunting down with a magnifying mirror and readers.

I’m talking specifically about chin hairs, nose hairs, and eyebrows that have decided to express themselves like Andy Rooney.

Eyebrows

I was endowed with lots of hair. I come from a long line of men who had to shave their face twice a day and their back during the warmer months. Thankfully I am also a redhead so the hair on my body is blond or so light red it’s not very noticeable.

Unless you’re looking at my chin.

I entered the 90s with the kind of eyebrows only Brooke Shields could truly appreciate. Thankfully I did not pluck them into two tiny commas like the cast of Friends.

Mostly because I didn’t have time. There were just too many of them and I had a toddler to chase.
Back then my eyebrows behaved normally. A quick brush and they stayed where they belonged. Occasionally I’d wax the little stray hairs creeping onto my eyelids like squatters, but otherwise they were manageable.

Then I turned 50 and my eyebrows entered their “retired railroad conductor” era.

They didn’t thin out. They grew longer.

Apparently eyebrow hairs no longer stop at a reasonable length once menopause arrives. Now I have to trim them regularly, which feels like something that should only happen to old men who refuse to wear hearing aids.

And they aren’t just longer. Now there are black wiry hairs and random white hairs sticking straight up, refusing to lie down with the rest when I brush them into place.

And yet when I try to pluck those specific hairs, I can never find them.

Instead I end up plucking the perfectly innocent red ones and suddenly I’ve got a gap in my eyebrow like some kind of gang banger.

Part of me wants to see how long they’d grow if left alone, but I remember an important lesson from a Marie Osmond article in Tiger Beat sometime around 1979: brush the eyebrow hairs down before trimming them or the shape gets wonky.

She probably didn’t use the word “wonky,” but the woman knew what she was talking about.

Of course, at the time Marie Osmond probably thought she was dealing with normal eyebrow maintenance, not the advanced stages of eyebrow evolution.

I wonder how she’s handling it today.

Chin Hairs

I never used to have chin hairs. Then sometime in my 50s one appeared, got lonely, and invited friends.

Now it’s just whack-a-mole with tweezers.

I cannot bring myself to shave the chin hairs, even though it would be much faster and easier.

Instead I dermablade, which is still dragging a razor across my face, but somehow not shaving.

The worst part is you can feel the chin hair. Sometimes you can even see its shadow. But the second you look in the mirror to pluck it, it goes into hiding.
Which means out comes the lighted magnifying mirror.

A device specifically designed to destroy a woman’s confidence one pore at a time.
And somehow the tiny invisible chin hair you couldn’t find yesterday has overnight transformed into a black cat whisker strong enough to pick up satellite radio.

At this point my chin hairs are among the most reliable things in my life.

I can count on them in ways I was never able to count on my ex-husbands.

Like laundry and unsolicited political opinions on Facebook, they are simply always there for me.
There’s comfort in that.

How other people see these things and say nothing remains deeply troubling to me.

If I have spinach in my teeth or a three-inch whisker growing out of my chin, I would appreciate a heads up.

That’s just basic community service.

Nose Hairs

Thankfully I rarely notice my nose hairs because I’m short and most people aren’t looking up there anyway.
Small blessings.

Although every once in a while I catch one in the magnifying mirror and realize the situation up there is becoming less “lady” and more “retired fisherman in northern Minnesota.”

Aging is humbling that way.

You spend your younger years trying to become attractive and your 50s trying to keep random hairs from escaping your face in public.

Still, there’s something comforting in realizing most women my age are probably standing in front of the same terrifying magnifying mirror doing exactly the same thing.

Squinting. Plucking. Trimming. Pretending dermablading is somehow entirely different from shaving.
And hoping someone would tell us if the chin whisker became visible in public.