The Awkwardness of Threading My Eyebrows

Entering a Women’s Safe Space to Remove my Unibrow

A.J. Bryant
3 min readJul 11, 2022
Photo by Rune Enstad on Unsplash

About every three weeks, I visit a store that causes severe social anxiety. I endure about a half-hour of awkwardness and cannot wait to leave. I pay 15 dollars for the experience.

I’m talking about getting my eyebrows threaded.

I began threading my eyebrows 11 years ago. They look pretty terrible if unkempt. I have a unibrow if unattended. A former girlfriend told me that I should tidy up my eyebrows when we dated. I took her advice and joined her at a threading salon one afternoon. I was hooked.

Actually, that’s not true. I appreciated the result. They definitely looked cleaner, but the whole social situation distressed me.

Some say that threading one’s eyebrows are more hygienic than waxing. I have nothing to add, as I’ve not tried waxing. This post is not about threading advocacy. I want to explain how awkward the situation is for me, as a man, particularly an Indian one

For the last seven years, I’ve had my eyebrows done at ‘Unique Threads’ in Union Station, Washington D.C. It used to be an open-air kiosk on the second floor. Pre-pandemic they moved into one of the storefronts. Whereas before I was in the middle of foot traffic, now one can see me through big…

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A.J. Bryant

Adopted from Kerala. I write about adoption, my intercultural marriage, contemporary India and more. Prawns are my love language.