They never tell you about your eyebrows. 

They never tell you that you are going to lose your eyebrows. No one mentions it. It’s not in any of the literature…well, not in anything I read before it started to happen. Gradually, but then, one day, WHAM. Gone. Wisps of white here and there. Don’t pull them! They are all you have!

So, you knew about pubic hair loss. Well, no big deal on a daily basis…no need to fill in the spaces with pencil lines before you go out. But your eyebrows are on your face.

Now, for those of us who reached a certain age and never bothered much with makeup: Be initiated into the special world of eyebrow replacement makeup.

So many choices and decisions: A pencil? A wet brush? A dry brush? Oh, and then you could get your eyebrows tattooed in. That sounded like fun…not! Especially since you need to have it done every few months. If you want permanence, how about this? A plastic surgeon extracts hair follicles from your head and places them in tiny slits made in your eyebrows.

Waterproof. Smudge proof. Stylus definer. Dual end. Precise. Ultra-fine. Long-lasting, defining, retractable, precision tip. Magical Upgraded. And then each brand has it wonder: Cover Girl clean fresh brow filler pomade or Easy Breezy. Revlon color stay micro. Laura Geller sculpt and stay…

And colors. Do you choose a color that matches the color your hair used to be? If you can recall. Or gray. Fine. Gray. Try to find gray. It isn’t easy. Try blonde, light blonde, auburn, taupe, brown — soft, medium, dark or black-brown, or black. You could take the Maybelline ​“Brow Makeup Finder,” which promises that you will ​“meet the hero of your brow routine.”

And then you begin a new fixation. You stare at the women news caster. At her eyebrows. At the arch. At the shape. At the color. 

And you stare at your friends, the ones that are around your age. No, I am not staring at your eyes — my gaze is about an inch higher. Are those your own? Have you perfected the eyebrow pencil line? Do you realize that you are only coloring in the middle? Do you care?

The learning curve for applying an eyebrow pencil is as steep as the arch of an eyebrow. The main issue is figuring out where exactly the eyebrow used to be. And then trying to get the pencil to mimic a collection of small hairs, rather than the line you put under the heading of your grocery list.

Perhaps the answer is to just smile. Smile a lot. Then folks will think you are up to something special and won’t look at your eyebrows.