My Least Favorite Facial Feature Growing Up Is Now One I Put on Display Every Day

I'll be the first to admit that I love my thick eyebrows. They're easily my favorite thing about my appearance, but it wasn't always this way. You see, for years I struggled to accept myself for who I am and my Latina features. Growing up, I used to hate my brows, and now I couldn't be more thankful for them. However, it was a long journey to get to this point of self-acceptance and self-love, with a couple of mishaps along the way.

As a kid, I had always noticed that my eyebrows were a lot thicker and longer than those on everyone else around me. But, of course, my mother wouldn't allow me to touch them when I was still very young, and I had to wait until I was at least 13 years old to get them groomed. In the meantime, I took some desperate measures to take attention away from my bushy arches and allow people to pay attention to my other features. I tried spritzing hairspray on a toothbrush to comb them down and attempt to keep them in place (although it didn't work at all). I even went as far as getting bangs so I could cover them with my hair, which sounds beyond silly to me now, but it was a security blanket.

Being younger always comes with insecurities, and unfortunately, one of my biggest vulnerabilities was right there on my face. So when the time came that I was allowed to groom my eyebrows, I nearly jumped for joy and couldn't wait to get them waxed. Because I was so happy with the way that they looked, I ended up going overboard and now had eyebrows that were too thin for my face. It felt like a constant struggle of never being happy with my brows, and I was forced to let them grow out again to get the shape I wanted.

What I didn't realize then is that having thicker, fuller hair is a result of my background and my roots. Being of Puerto Rican and Cuban descent, all of the women in my family have very prominent features, and that includes their eyebrows. Latina celebrities including Sofia Vergara, Salma Hayek, Eva Mendes, and more all have beautifully full arches that were passed down to them from generations before.

Today, having full eyebrows is the all-American dream. There's been a spike in trends such as microblading and products to fill in your eyebrows over the last few years because everyone is embracing the more prominent brow. Compared to when I was growing up in the '90s, I now see a lot more women who have eyebrows like mine and are taking full ownership of it. The trend back then was thin, skinny eyebrows, but today we have so many ways of adding natural-looking fibers to our brows for them to look the complete opposite.

I'll admit that although I'm not someone who wears makeup every day, I never leave the house without groomed eyebrows. Whether it's with an eyebrow pencil, a pomade, or a combing gel, I always have to make sure that they're full and bold. I've since grown them to the thickness that I prefer, and it's one of my features that gets noticed the most. While I no longer feel insecure about my natural-born eyebrows, it doesn't hurt that others now tell me how much they love them too. I'm so proud of being able to enjoy them and understand that they're a piece of my Latin culture and what makes me, me.