By Jae-Ha Kim
Chicago Sun-Times
August 8, 2000
George W. Bush is a plucker.
Take a peek at his pictures from the 1980s and you’ll see that he was sporting a unibrow that has now disappeared.
He isn’t alone. To pluck or not to pluck is no longer a question for men to evade. More men are now answering the call with a quick, definitive tweeze.
Tending to one’s brows has been commonplace in the gay community and in show business for decades. But these days, “regular” guys are succumbing to the promise of a clean, relatively hairless face.
“It’s pretty common now for men to come in to get their eyebrows taken care of,” says Karen Storino, a skin care specialist at the Hair Loft downtown. “Usually their girlfriends and wives bring them in, but once they see how much better they look afterwards, they’ll come back later by themselves.
“Women don’t care if their eyebrows look like they’ve been shaped, but men want them to look as natural as possible–as if their brows haven’t been touched. They want to look like George Clooney, not Michael Jackson.”
That said, even those men who leave the salon with brows that look like Clooney’s don’t want people–particularly other men–knowing that they’ve been plucked.
“It’s one of those in-the-closet things,” says veteran Los Angeles stylist Phillip Bloch, author of Elements of Style: From the Portfolio of Hollywood’s Premier Stylist. “It’s not necessarily something that comes up in conversation. They kinda keep it to themselves.”
Chicago-based stylist Karen Lynn concurs. She says that most of the movie stars she works on come in well-groomed, with eyebrows that have already been tended to in Hollywood. But the sports celebrities she works with flinch when she suggests trimming down their brows.
“They’ll grudgingly allow me to take out some stray hairs,” Lynn says of the athletes. “And the funny thing is that once I’m done, they really like the way their brows open up their face. It’s just something they’re not completely used to yet.”
Actually, when it comes to men’s eyebrows, “they call it shaping instead of plucking,” says Alan Thomas, director of Giovanni Model Management in Toronto. “It’s men’s grooming. We use words like `groom’ and `shape’ rather than `pluck’ and `comb.’ You’re not going to go in and pluck Ricky Martin, you’re going to groom him.”
Makeup artist Denis Blanger, who works out of Montreal’s large, trendy Tonic salon, feels this is all part of today’s new masculinity, which focuses on smooth, hairless bodies.
“Men want to look good,” he says. “There’s a lot of pressure to look good. If you look in the magazines, all the men are buff and clean-shaven. It started with the gay community. Now it’s expanding to the heterosexual community.”
In her book The Eyebrow (Regan Books, $30), Robyn Cosio writes: “The eyebrow can make such a dramatic difference in your total look. . . . It has only been in the last decade that some men have tended to their eyebrows, going to facial salons or spas and, in a private room, having an aesthetician or brow expert tweeze out hairs that march across their noses, or even tinting their brows to make them look thicker.”
But it seems some men are going too far. And the jump from Grandpa Munster to Mr. Spock can be drastic.
“I’ve noticed in the last six months a lot of the younger men are overplucking their eyebrows and looking a little bit girly,” says Toronto makeup artist Ernesto Rodrigues, whose work often appears in TV commercials, music videos and fashion spreads.
“The Backstreet Boys are a perfect example of what you shouldn’t do. It’s just too unnatural. You can tell right away that they’ve been plucked and tweezed to death. From an aesthetics point of view, I don’t like to see that.”
Contributing: National Post
