In late January, when a friend emailed to alert me that her favorite brow person was doing a residency uptown not far from where I lived. I laughed. “I have no brows,” I responded. “I belong to the great Carolyn Bessette disappearing eyebrow generation!”
I arrived in New York, young and impressionable, not long after Ms. Bessette married John F. Kennedy Jr. in 1996.
For those of us who had no chance at mimicking Ms. Bessette Kennedy’s “willowy and beautiful” physique (as Time magazine described it) or her “buttery chunks” (how the hairstylist Brad Johns described her highlights), there were her eyebrows. Newsweek, in a somewhat alarming step-by-step guide to her face, detailed Ms. Bessette Kennedy’s barely there brows: “They used to be more of a half-circle. Now they’re straighter with no pronounced arch, probably waxed or tweezed.”
And just like that, off went millions of brows. For some of us, never to return, thanks to overplucking.
I was quickly assured my friend’s brow person, Sania Vucetaj of Sania’s Brow Bar in the Flatiron district, that this was not a problem.
I was intrigued. I did not want microblading or tinting or anything artificially permanent. How would my own brows be fixed?
Brows are the workhorse of the face. They affect everything. Mine were pitiful and short and tired. They no longer even needed to be plucked. Whereas my mother could not conceive of being seen in public without lipstick, I never left the house without extending mine with a pencil. Otherwise I felt naked. Was there a possibility of more?
A week later, my meager brows and I arrived at her spacious and welcoming salon in the Flatiron district.
Ms. Vucetaj, 55, who hails from the Bronx, has been in the brow business for nearly as long as mine have been missing. She became obsessed after a childhood fall left her with a scar over one eye and eventually started doing brows for friends “at bars, in the corner, in the bathrooms,” she said. “They called me the brow lady.”
Shortly after graduating from a 10-month aesthetician night class, Ms. Vucetaj answered an ad for an upscale brow specialist, “tweezing only,” and found herself on the floor of Bergdorf Goodman in 2002, where she quickly developed a cult following that included the likes of Kathie Lee Gifford and Susan Brown (former wife of Michael Bloomberg). Two years later, she opened her salon.
Ms. Vucetaj still only does brows. And she only tweezes, making her a rarity. “Tweezing is precise,” Ms. Vucetaj said. “Every single hair makes a statement.”
Her goal is to return your eyebrows to their original state. Almost.
“Eyebrows should be close to what you were born with. Just with a little bit of shape.”
I showed her a photo of Ms. Bessette Kennedy, if only to prove my initial intentions were innocent enough. “She’s very beautiful,” she said. “Now imagine how much more beautiful she’d have looked if she had full ones.”
Ms. Vucetaj was unfazed by the state of my brows. More important, she told me, Ms. Bessette Kennedy might not be to blame.
While overtweezing can weaken the hair, the real villain, Ms. Vucetaj said, is our skin care routines. “Can you imagine putting all your skin products into your scalp?” she said. (I cannot.) She added that we should treat our brows like our hair. Keep them clean.
The first step was to even things out: “I believe brows are always twins. Not sisters, not cousins, twins. So, I reshape them so they look balanced.” Clients are told to return every six weeks for shaping ($95) as the hair (hopefully) returns.
She began reshaping mine by taking a little off the top, and the bottom. I was surprised at the immediate difference. They looked intentional now. And, ironically, already more substantial.
Then out came the pencil so she can fill in what’s not (yet) there. She has her own line: a combination of powder and pencil in a wedge shape, with a brush on one end to blend ($30). It comes in three colors: Light, medium, dark.
The key is “not to go inside. It’s more trace above, trace below, blend it through and soft.”
This was new to me. Normally I pencil over what hair is there, and then simply extend. I watched as she thickened my brows into lush-looking arches that appeared totally natural, even to me. Goodbye, CBK. Hello, Brooke Shields.
Ms. Vucetaj said it would take six to 12 months to see any regrowth on her regimen of getting tweezed. Draw them in the meantime, she said, and before you apply your skin care so you know where to avoid.
Initially my new face looked strange to me. These thicker brows appeared slightly masculine in the mirror. However, in subsequent selfies to document exactly what had been done, I can’t get over how much bigger my eyes looked. Are those cheekbones I see?
This is serious business to Ms. Vucetaj: “You never want to play with the frame of your face or your eyes. You can play with everything else.”
