“I LOVE your eyebrows! They are so THICK and ARCHED! You’re lucky you know! Thick eyebrows are really IN right now.”

Dear Society…

So now you like our eyebrows? So now you like our eyebrows. And Hollywood likes our eyebrows and the magazines really like our eyebrows. The boys think they are sexy and the girls are play jealous and now we are allowed to love our eyebrows, right? Thanks for reinforcing the trending superficialities that allow us to inconsistently love ourselves. NOT.

I say this because I want you to remember. Remember these eyebrows years ago? These are the same eyebrows that you shamed in middle school for connecting in the center, forming the first unibrow you’d ever seen. These are the same eyebrows that made you feel uncomfortable when strands of hair fell over their arches and touched our eyelashes. These are the same eyebrows that distanced you from making friends with us when we really felt isolated in the classroom. We didn’t look like many people because of our body hair, or our leftover lunch, our parents accents, and our history. But our body hair was an easy way for you to dehumanize our presences. These eyebrows have been through your childlike harassment and they have been through self-hate when all we wanted was to be reinforced as important living children. They have been shamed. So, is that compliment your redemption?

I want you to remember that person you made fun of for having a unibrow and having that upper lip hair or extra chest hair arm hair, really any natural body manifestation that strayed from the norm. Now I want you to be aware of that while you compliment threaded, thick, separated eyebrows.

Personally, I don’t have a unibrow anymore. I separated them because no one told me I could be loved with a unibrow, except for my parents. I wanted to fit in and I needed to blend in. But now we stand out, because our eyebrows may be separated, or they may be together, but genetics has kept their thickness golden and growing us has kept them resistant.

This letter is for you to know that I am not flattered by your words. Actually, I am disgusted by the media’s control in how you treat us. Media dictates when people are allowed to embrace “unique” features and when they “should” reject them. When you compliment our eyebrows now, I don’t know trust it. I hope all beings whom were shamed for anything now live to reestablish self love. That’s an honest relationship.

I trust my own self love. I am in love with my eyebrows because they have been strong throughout childhood bullying and late night plucks where all I could see was ugly. I am in love with them even when they touch during midterms because this is me reclaiming myself. My compliment to myself is the only one I need, so save your breath babe and take your trending somewhere else.