black magic; Thick and daring, the brows have it.

Byline: Valerie Steiker

Spring fashion calls for strong eyebrows, and for once I will fit right in. It won't be on purpose, exactly. I've always had them. At this point, it's almost a matter of pride that I've never subjected my brow to the vagaries of style.

I have vivid memories, as most women do of their mothers, of watching my mother put on makeup. She kept her own bathroom, separate from my father's, in our Manhattan apartment, and had all the ruddy pots and shimmering tubes and mysterious unguents of womanhood laid out on little silver or painted trays. As she ritually put on first foundation, then eye shadow, mascara, and lipstick in quick succession, I had time as a young girl to memorize every curve of her face, her high cheekbones, her _almond-_shaped eyes, her lovely but somewhat spare lashes. And then came the moment that she would put on her eyebrows. After years of determined pruning and shaping, her natural ones had practically disappeared. So with a brown pencil and a careful hand, she drew in a perfectly arched set.

The idea of it seemed silly, and at the same time I wondered if I would ever do it myself. In her strong French accent, my Belgian mother made many pronouncements about what a woman should or shouldn't do. Perhaps because I lost her at an early age, I have followed her lead on many things. I keep my makeup in little trays. I never leave the house with chipped polish. I love a good glove, gold wedding bands, a bright lipstick. But I've never so much as touched my eyebrows. And in fact, when I sense someone staring too long at the well-_furnished area between my forehead and my eyes, I have an urge to quote silver-screen legend Ray Milland. "If you're counting my eyebrows, I can help you. There are two."

I didn't set out to take a stand about them. It's not like anyone ever said to me, Oh, your eyebrows are _amazing! You should never lay a tweezer on them! If anything, I think it's taken me years to grow into them. They were a silent embarrassment to me as a child, like having flat feet in ballet class. A five-year-old with pronounced eyebrows is not the most natural sight in the world. Being a dark-_haired, pale-_skinned girl, I was naturally drawn to delicately browed brunette _icons-Ava Gardner, Elizabeth Taylor, Jackie O. The arrival of Brooke Shields, to me and my eyebrows, was a godsend.

As I grew a bit older I came to realize that people have certain expectations about a woman's eyebrows. They should be ladylike, _demure-like good manners, so discreet as to be completely unobtrusive. As a counterpoint, I liked to picture women in history who must have had robust eyebrows. Cleopatra. Helen of Troy. The eyebrows that could sink a thousand ships. Sometimes I liked to imagine that my own _eyebrows-_rugged and _individualistic-would have been good on the frontier. ...