August 8, 2000
By Jae-Ha Kim
Chicago Sun-Times
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
Threading the eyebrow: twist and shout
May 13, 2003
By Jae-Ha Kim
Chicago Sun-Times
Threading is so old school
it's trendy.
The ancient Middle Eastern
practice of hair removal is tops with trendsetters such as Jennifer Aniston
and Salma Hayek. Even Grammy winner
Michelle Branch sings the praises of threading.
What exactly is threading?
It's the process of knotting a piece of thread to create a trap, twisting
the hair and forcing it out by the root. Quicker
than you can scream, "Ow!" your eyebrow is on its way to looking clean
and shapely.
Threading may be done on
any flat surface of the body. Therefore, eyebrows are in. Bikini lines
definitely are out.
"My clients love it because
we don't use warm wax or anything that could damage their skin," says Elizabeth
Arden aesthetician Naimeh Sadreddini.
Prices range from $20 to
get rid of lip and chin hair, to $30 to thread both eyebrows. If you're
particularly furry, you may want to opt for the $55 full face threading
special.
"More and more people are
coming in asking for this service," says Sadreddini. "They love it because
they say their hair grows back thinner and
lighter."
And about those guys?
"I have some male clients,"
she says. "But they can't handle the pain as well as women."
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