THE BROWPSYCH

“Where have you left your eyebrows?” The tone is set. I am with Roya, a.k.a. the guru, a.k.a. the hope of famous Netherlands, a.k.a. the woman behind the brow. Years ago, a makeup artist told me the secret behind her perfect eyebrow. That was after months of begging and eventually strategically using bribes.

Roya was the magic word. Roya is responsible for the cool looks of Renate Gerschtanowitz, Lieke and Jetteke van Lexmond, all the trendy girls from the city, and also Connie Breukhoven (who of course has a different name now, but otherwise you have no idea who I’m talking about) goes at least once a month in horizontal position at Roya.

Roya speaks to me reproachfully. Repeatedly, thank goodness, because otherwise I would have had a crushed ego. Seventeen times I hear that I ‘have a very beautiful face’, but then she has to breathe controlled to puff away the pain of my disappeared eyebrow.

“Such a beautiful face,” she sighs further “But an eyebrow of an old lady.”

There was a time, you should know, that I had an incredibly full bush above my eyes. Really, Brooke Shields had nothing on it. But that couldn’t be, halfway through the nineties. So I plucked it like crazy. If I had gotten a euro for every hair removed (even though it was still guilder time then), I could have had an unlimited account at Net-A-Porter by now. I had been told that hairs on the top of your eyebrow don’t grow back, but I actually thought that was good news. Because ugly, I thought it was. Correction: that was it.

But then suddenly there was Maartje Verhoef and the eyebrow was on. Not plucking was the motto. I did that obediently, but not much happened. So I had to go to Roya for advice. We had to book two months in advance, that’s how hot the chair is there. It could only be a day after the Look of the Year Awards, so we would be hungover in the chair. But so be it, everything for Roya, even though I had never been there before. “Your left eyebrow is higher than the right. The right one is by your heart so that muscle moves more intensely.” I had never thought about it that way before.

“And your forehead is quite wide, so that eyebrow should also be a bit wider. And it needs to go down.” When I was almost crumpled in the wrinkles (and of course I also had quite a hangover from the party, as if it wasn’t bad enough), her redeeming words came. “Give me half a year. Or a year. But it will be fine. It will be fine.”