Mom has a small group of close friends, and each one of them has a seriously unique eyebrow situation going on. Here are all five of Mom’s friends ranked by how weird their eyebrows are.
5. Trina
Trina is Mom’s “gym friend” who always stands too close to her during Low-Impact Zumba on Wednesday mornings. She shaved off her eyebrows in the late ’80s and ever since then has been drawing them on with a black eyeliner pencil that loosely rolls around in the cupholder of her giant minivan. Without fail, Trina’s brows completely melt off by the end of Zumba, and they leave little dark trails of black, smeared eyeliner down her face that make her look like the demon in a horror movie that somehow emerges from a lake completely dry. As disconcerting as that may look, Trina’s eyebrow situation is nothing compared to what Mom’s four other friends have happening, which is why she comes in at number five in terms of eyebrow weirdness on this list of all the people Mom hangs out with.
4. Kathleen
Despite being a natural brunette with very dark features, Kathleen—who Mom met “at the market,” whatever that means—dyes her eyebrows so light blonde that you almost can’t see them. In fact, the only time to really get a good look is when Kathleen shows up at the house at 6 a.m. without warning to drop off a crate of her home-grown oranges. Right as she leans forward to pass them off and say, “I also checked your mail for you,” the light hits her forehead and her previously invisible eyebrows are thrown into sudden, shocking relief, like watermarks on a dollar bill or stains under a black light. Kathleen has never explained why she dyes her eyebrows this way, except for the time she alluded to the fact that she had “a bunch of extra bleach lying around and no idea what to do with it.” Whether Kathleen colors her eyebrows off-white because she likes them that way or just out of boredom, she definitely has the number-four-strangest brows of Mom’s social circle.
3. Rosalie
Rosalie is different than a lot of Mom’s other friends because instead of altering her eyebrows, she just lets them run wild. It seems like every time she shows up for Mom’s book club and pulls a 17 oz. container of unrefrigerated Sabra hummus out of her purse, the thicket of hair that extends both above and below her brow line has overrun even more of her face. The strangest part of the whole scenario is that Rosalie is a cosmetologist—so she has all the tools and skills necessary to give her eyebrows a more typical look, but she doesn’t do it. Rosalie is the kind of person who makes hugs less fun by saying, “Where’s my hug?” before they happen, and she ranks third in the lineup of Mom’s friends with bafflingly insane eyebrows.
2. Dana
The first time Mom met Dana was when she showed up uninvited to a wine painting party 30 minutes before the end carrying a half-finished image of the same beach scene everyone else was working on. When Mom complimented Dana on her painting ability, Dana said, “Thanks, I get it from my son.” Mom and Dana struck up a friendship pretty much immediately after that, and the whole way through Dana has always had the same eyebrow deal: She makes her brows thicker by drawing a dark outline around them in black pencil, and then extends the outer end of each eyebrow so that they continue down her face and connect at her chin. There’s pretty much no approximation of that kind of eyebrow shape in nature, so no one has any clue where Dana got the idea from. The sheer, incomprehensible madness of the look gives Dana the second-most-bizarre eyebrows of all of Mom’s friends.
1. Grace
Grace lives in the house down the street that has really tasteful Christmas lights, and she always shows up to Mom’s famous potlucks with the only healthy side dish. The craziest thing about Grace’s eyebrows is that they are absolutely fucking perfect. They’re managed, but not obsessively so; shaped, but natural—a sip of fresh water in the endless desert of deranged eyebrow grooming that is Mom’s friend group. It is precisely their perfection that makes Grace’s eyebrows the strangest of the bunch. It’s like seeing a single children’s shoe in the middle of the street—Grace’s brows don’t belong here, and that makes them terrifying. At any time, Grace could show each and every one of Mom’s friends how to tweeze their eyebrows into a regular shape, but instead she stands resolute with her own tasteful brows and says nothing. When you see her sitting among the rest of Mom’s friends at one of their This Is Us analysis meet-ups, nothing could be clearer: Grace has the most maniacally perplexing eyebrows in the group, and perhaps the world.
