Hilary Fannin: Pluck, I say! Pluck until even the cat startles at your nudity

Autumn fashions are hitting the shops and already we are being encouraged to scurry madly around in preparation for the over-the-knee revival, searching out the right “boot du jour” and the tightest micro-mini to squeeze into. But while some fashionistas are also urging us to douse our “second-skin silhouettes” in colour and allow slinky 1990s-style shapes to lure us into the season, other pundits have much bristlier fish to fry.

What, we demand of them, is the fall fate of eyebrows? Riddle us that, ye gurus of the on-trend universe!

I can only imagine the sleepless nights spent under the vast starry cornucopia above as ragged sections of the population worry themselves witless over whether to pluck or not to pluck. Yep, it’s a conundrum all right. Luckily, however, I’m here to pour some multipeptide brow-and-lash serum on troubled water.

Pluck, I say! Pluck like there’s no tomorrow. Pluck until you resemble a portrait of Elizabeth I with a bare arch of sandy and sceptical brow drawn above an unamused alabaster countenance. Pluck like you’ve been peering at the Spanish Armada through a crude telescope. Pluck with abandon, pluck until you’re a spent shadow of your formerly hirsute self and even the cat startles at your nudity.

Can we finally say goodbye to shaming women for letting their hair go grey?

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Pluck yourself sideways, pluck with gusto, pluck until you find yourself strewn across the tangled sheets, tweezers discarded, magnifying mirror clouded with your own hot breath.

We all know the beauty industry is worth a lot of money. Anyone who’s ever lain on a beautician’s table to have molten wax spread over their pubes with a palette knife knows there be gold in them there half-leg hills

The brow gods have decreed (for anyone who gives a toss) that thin brows are making a “huge comeback” this season. Be not alarmed, however. Apparently we’re not talking the exaggeratedly overplucked look that causes one to resemble a hard-boiled and somewhat supercilious egg. Nope, according to my extensive research (I was flicking through a couple of mags in the salon across the road), today’s thin brow should still be imbued with “texture and density”.

Read more from Hilary Fannin

We all know that the beauty industry, in Ireland as elsewhere, is worth a lot of money. Anyone who’s ever willingly lain down on a beautician’s table to have molten wax spread evenly over their pubes with a palette knife knows there be gold in them there half-leg hills.

(I’m inordinately fond of my beauty therapist, by the way. Visits to her couch have superseded any nascent desire on my part to revisit the confession box. I’d go so far as to say that pouring out your heart to someone who nods sagely while silently depilating your kneecap may be as bracing as psychoanalysis.)

Anyway, back to brows. In recent years, the beauty industry has encouraged us to wear statement brows, big, assertive yokes that sit above our peepers like ferocious sentinels guarding our innermost thoughts. Sadly, however, that tattooed tomahawk-ish look has now been deemed utterly yesterday and it’s time for a coffer-filling change of direction.

My mother could spot a nicely shaped eyebrow at a hundred paces. ‘Look at that woman with the chihuahua/dribbling husband/silver slingbacks,’ she’d mutter. ‘Christ, what I wouldn’t do for her eyebrows’

My recent salon visit for a half-leg deforestation happened to coincide with the fifth anniversary of the death of my mother, a woman who could spot a nicely shaped eyebrow at a hundred paces. Visits to public places, say for a coffee or a stiff gin, often resulted in her becoming entirely distracted by a stranger’s brow line. “Look at that woman with the chihuahua/dribbling husband/silver slingbacks,” she’d mutter. “Christ, what I wouldn’t do for her eyebrows.”

My mother’s eyebrow envy was the result, simply, of having absolutely none of her own. As a younger woman she had, like many of her contemporaries, plucked herself into oblivion. What remained of her brows resembled the merest rind of a crescent moon. She used to draw on a pair every morning with a cosmetic pencil and as the day wore on she’d look gradually less startled.

Oh I don’t know, maybe it’s no surprise that many woman of her generation chose to have no eyebrows and to cultivate an inscrutable, almost unreadable, expression. Maybe that beloved arch was a kind of camouflage in a society that liked little girls made of sugar and spice to grow up into big girls containing the same ingredients.

Take away a woman’s right to work, to end her marriage and to control her own fertility or finances, then have a really good laugh by making it impossible for her even to buy a washing machine on hire purchase without her husband’s permission, and finally try telling her that being angry makes her ugly – well, then see what happens.

I guess I’ll miss the big-brow years, the times when young women with Amazonian eyebrows strode through the city knocking down the plucking doors.