Some hair will not grow back, and it's usually not the hair you don't want. I learned this the hard way when I was 12 years old and had a bad habit of scratching my face. Yes, it's as weird as you're imagining — I would literally idly scratch my face anytime I was bored. This wouldn't have been a big deal except that it caused my eyebrow hairs to fall out, which at first I thought was neat (I wasn't the sharpest 12-year-old, what do you want me to say?), but then I realized that I was losing those nice arch shapes. While some of my classmates were starting to talk about plucking their eyebrows, I had already eradicated the need.
Fast-forward a few years and now I'm a blossoming teenager — hormones raging like whoa — trying to win the attention of the opposite sex. Guess what I wish I had? Yup, eyebrows. What a sad statement that was right there. But because of my careless actions as a preteen, I now had incredibly sparse, barely there eyebrows at a pivotal time in my life. In an effort to solve this problem, I used brown pencil eyeliner to fill in my brows. I'm not sure if eyebrow powder was a thing back then, but if it was, I wasn't well-versed enough in makeup to know of its existence. The result of my pencil trick were pretty fake-looking arches that were at least three shades too light for my hair color, but it was better than not having any at all.
Today, I've become wholly reliant on eyebrow powder — I especially love Anastasia's Brow Powder Duo ($23) — and refuse to leave the house without it. The powder effect is softer and therefore more natural than a pencil, and when I use it to fill in the areas where my arches should be, it actually looks like I have real eyebrows. Friends and boyfriends have expressed shock that my brows are drawn in, and that (almost) makes the awkward years of penciling them in worth it.
