Spock, Anyone?

For a woman, losing an eyelash on or after the age of 40 is a lot like a man getting a flat tire...and not having a spare.

I discovered this the other night when, as I was applying mascara, a lash appeared to wobble, as if it was going to leave its foundation.

"No!" I whispered urgently, and was relieved to discover, after a thorough search of my mascara wand, it was some sort of optical illusion.

The first I heard about "older" women losing lashes and certain facial hair occurred during a makeup application session at a high-end cosmetics counter at a department store. "You have a lot of eyelashes for your age," the young girl told me. "Most older women don't have very many." I was 30 at the time.

"What?!" I asked her in alarm. "You mean I'm going to lose my eyelashes?!"

"Your eyebrows, too," she replied, matter-of-factly.

Ever since then, I've kept an eye out, pardon the pun, and she's right. When I was younger, I rubbed my eyes with the backs of my hands when I was tired. Now knowing the precious resource is fast dwindling and a bottle of mascara purchased in the next decade will probably last me to the end of my life, I have become careful about makeup application and removal, rubbing, and all things of or related to the eye.

In fact, I have become such an expert that it came to my attention that a good friend of mine needed some advice the other day. Being an especially cautious person in my choice of words and attentive as I am to other people's feelings, I blurted, "Friend (not her real name), you need to paint on the rest of your eyebrows. They're missing in action."

Like most of my friends, being especially cautious in their choice of words and attentive to other people's feelings, especially mine, this friend said, well, I can't tell you exactly what she said, but the gist of it was, well, I can't tell you that, either.

Nonetheless, a few days later, we found ourselves at a high-end cosmetics counter at a department store. (I know. I'm a glutton for punishment.)

"My friend here said I need the rest of my eyebrows," she told the young woman working the area.

"Oh yeah," the girl replied and, as if to prove to my friend something my friend already knew, the girl continued, "See? Your eyebrows end here." She poked the end of some sort of makeup application stick halfway above my friend's eye. "You only have half an eyebrow on each side."

"I have my dad's eyebrows," my friend answered.

I love nothing better than a comedic straight man, or in this case, a comedic straight woman. My filter, the one that screens what I think from what I say, malfunctioned.

"Then call your dad and ask him to send his half, and you can make a whole pair," I told her.

Fortunately for me, my friends are forgiving people. They have no choice. They have to be. She was.

My friend patiently waited for the girl to first mark, with pinpoint accuracy, the line of her left brow. Then, the girl proceeded to fill in the area with an eyebrow pencil. She painstakingly painted on a line then brushed it in, covering the dots she had made to mark the edges and angles of the new eyebrow.

"Gently," I coached the girl, as she brushed at the remaining strands. "She doesn't have many. You don't want to knock any loose."

When the girl turned her attention to my friend's right eye, I was surprised to hear her start talking about symmetry.

"You want your eyes to be even," she said. Then she proceeded to create her own eyebrow line, even veering off the angle of the little hair remaining at the outside of the eyebrow. While it may have matched the left eye, it was about an eighth of an inch above the hair of the right eye. When the girl was done, my friend looked a lot like Spock, half human, half android, with one brow looking as if she was questioning something.

"How does it look?" my friend asked. "I waited for the young girl to walk away to get a business card.

"It looks pretty good...on one side," I hedged, "but the other side she didn't even follow the hair line. She made her own eyebrow."

Then I realized that is why all of the old ladies' eyebrows are halfway between their receding hairlines and their eyes. Professionals "teach" them. They don't have someone with eyesight to tell them the truth.

The truth is that when you make your own eyebrows, when you paint them on, anyone who gets less than a football field away from you can tell. They can tell if you haven't followed the hair line or the regular arch of your eyebrows. They know. Unlike me, they may not tell you, but they know.

Then I noticed a thin black line on my friend's right cheek. "No!" I said. "She knocked a hair loose." In my opinion, it was insult to injury. My friend raised her right hand to brush it from her cheek. "Don't do that!" I fairly screamed. "You need that. Save it. We'll glue it back on."

I wondered if that wouldn't be the next big business...wigs for eyebrows. I thought about purchasing those fuzzy ones, the Groucho Marx versions sold at Halloween, and then sneaking into my friend's house and putting them on her while she was sleeping. I wondered how the police report would explain that one. I envisioned the headlines, "Woman Arrested Applying Eyebrows to Friend," with a sub-headline reading, "'I Had To Do It!' Follicle Finagler Tells Cops."

I wondered why it is that we lose the important, want-to-keep hair, and then start growing it on our chins and out of our ears.

"Let's get out of here," I told my friend. "I think your eyebrows look perfectly fine the way they were." My friend looked at me questioningly. Then I remembered she couldn't help it.