Next time you glance in the mirror, take a moment to appreciate your eyelashes. Then imagine yourself without any. Nothing to protect your eye from dust, nothing to visually define your eye other than skin color. Strange, eh? Not something you usually see.For three years, I habitually, willfully and addictively plucked my eyelashes completely out. My eyebrows I kept in a perfect arch (think film noir vamps) according to my idea of beauty at the time, but the second I'd feel an eyelash start to poke through the smooth and slightly swollen flesh of my eyelid, out would come the tweezers, and out would come the lash.
I don't even remember how it all started... It might have been an itch at the base of my lashes from wearing mascara, it might have just been a random impulse - in any case, by the time I hit my freshman year in high school, seeing the world through lashless eyes had become standard for me. I do remember that at first I'd only pluck the outer lashes from the top lid, possibly because the skin was less sensitive (or at least less tortuously so). After a while, though, the tingling burn I'd feel when I'd touch the edges of my eyelids moved in further along my upper lid, demanding the sacrifice of further unwitting lashes, and eventually spread to the bottom.
I have to admit that I felt guilty for a very long time about it; it's just not something normal girls DO in high school, if ever. Then again, I never said I was normal... But anyhow - I looked at it basically the same way as I looked at biting my nails. Just another nervous habit. Of course, my mother, being as wonderful and caring and overly concerned as she is (and, I believe, as all mothers must be), decided to take me to a doctor... where it was discovered that I must have a strangely specific case of alopecia areata.
DIGRESSION - if you either know what alopecia is, or just don't give a rat's ass, please move on to the next paragraph. For those of you who don't know, alopecia is basically an autoimmune disease that, last I heard, is a complete mystery as far as cause and treatment go. Nothing to do with voluntary hair removal - basically, it causes hair to fall out, and, in many cases, to never grow back. A girl I knew in high school had universalis, a type of alopecia where all body hair is lost, so she had a wig, permanently tattooed eyebrows and permanently tattooed eyeliner. Of course, I wouldn't mind having localized alopecia, only on my legs and such... END DIGRESSION
Now, you know and I knew I didn't have alopecia. The question was, was I going to tell anyone? Of course not. However, once I had discovered that there were people in the world that suffered from a condition that I was basically voluntarily (and rather specifically) inflicting upon myself, I didn't feel quite as abnormal. Granted, people would more than occasionally stare at my face, trying to figure out what was missing from the picture, but they'd never quite get it, I don't think. I had naturally dark hair and eyebrows at the time, along with moderately pale skin, so my eyes did definitely look strange, but eyelashes just aren't on the list of standard removables from the body. So my mother took me out to buy fake eyelashes, and I became quite the expert at applying them, along with liquid eyeliner and all that good stuff that I revel in using these days. However, I remember once I got home and had applied the lashes to my naked lids... I was disappointed. I looked almost normal again.
I had grown rather fond of the way the only darkness near my eyes was in the iris and pupil of the eye itself. There was an unusual sleekness and alien feel to my eyes - they're not terribly large, but they are roundly almond-shaped, and I like to think they're quite nice, with or without lashes. I was just starting into the gothique phase of my high school career, and the physical strangeness pleased me. It had gone beyond some strange masochistic habit to the realm of voluntary modification of my features. Granted, it was relatively temporary, as well as somewhat subtle... But I loved the addictive burn when I plucked, and I loved the confused attention my face received from people unfamiliar with it.
I had never thought of myself as beautiful - vaguely cute, maybe, but I had suffered from a rather uncomfortably long period of stubborn "baby fat," as my hopeful grandmother called it. I grew into my weight (mostly - now I'm nice and voluptuous, and I enjoy the hell out of it) by the middle of high school, but it was only through the lack of eyelashes that I started to realize the potential of beauty through non-standard means. I embraced that for a while, then, as a result of learning all sorts of make-up tricks for the purpose of disguising my eyelashness, I took things to the other extreme. I practiced a lot with makeup, and got pretty good at doing whatever the hell I wanted to with it. (Even considered making it into a career... but that's another story.) Eventually, right around my senior year, I noticed that I had the impulse to pluck less and less frequently. I had also become much more confident about my self-image, and I thought beauty was whatever I wanted it to be - I had given up the sour grapes anti-beauty perspective that I had embraced for so long.
It's been about three years now since I last fully plucked my eyelashes. I've gone through a lot, as we all do, but I've never returned to lash plucking as a nervous habit. Every now and then, I spy someone with (I assume) alopecia, and I admire the clarity of their eyes, the straightforwardness with which their eyes address the world. It might seem a strange thought, but people are very much influenced by their appearence (as well as vice versa), whether they look the way they do voluntarily or not. Apparently, I had to clear distractions from my vision before I could continue on my path to where I find myself today... But sometimes, I wish i could return to that lashless time, just to see what there is to see.
I received the following note after this was published:There is a mental "disorder" that is associated with habitually removing the hair by plucking one by one. In babies it is usually due to a lack of iron in their diet, but in adolescents it is a nervous disorder that many people "suffer" from. In my nineteen years on this planet I have come across two people with this disorder (whose name escapes me presently, but I KNOW it's not alopecia) one girl habitually plucked her eyelashes, and one girl plucked her hair. The girl who plucked her hair had received standard treatments of drugs (antidepressants) and behaviour modification, which hadn't worked. She doesn't pluck her hair anymore but she says that every time she takes a test she plucks her hair away.