A few years ago, a makeup-obsessed friend demanded I be the subject of her latest eye shadow experiment. It was a boring Saturday evening so I thought, why the heck not? 

After two gruelling hours of applying four shades of eye shadow, some eyeliner, mascara, and other beauty products I frankly cannot name, my friend realised something just didn't seem right. She studied me for a while, as I wondered what she could have possibly done to my face, and suddenly she had the answer – I didn't have eyebrows! No, she didn't shave them off as a cruel joke or anything, I actually (well practically) just didn't seem to have eyebrows. 

It all started when I was a baby (I presume). I know most babies are potatoes devoid of eyebrows, but they tend to grow more prominent as the years go by, the eyebrows I mean. At least, that is what I think happens to most brow-ed people. For me, I have always had extremely light, shapeless, practically non-existent eyebrows. I admit I've always wanted to live the Harry Potter fantasy, but identifying with Lord Voldemort wasn't really what I had in mind.

If you haven't figured it out yet, I'm not exactly what you would call a makeup guru. I can, however, apply eyeliner without completely resembling a panda. But no matter how much time I spent on my eyeliner, my face just didn't look right. Ever. I couldn't exactly pinpoint this to my eyebrows, or the lack thereof, and I now realise people around me probably didn't have the heart to break it to me. After all, how does a young girl lead a normal life without eyebrows? Had I got over the confusion sooner I could have just shaved off all of my eyebrows and drawn over them with a single pencil line but just as with Voldemort I didn't really want to resemble You-Know-Who, well the other You-Know-Who.

On that fateful day, my friend also explained that I should try shaping my eyebrows and making them darker with some eye shadow. I got right to it. I used black eye shadow too because everyone knows eyebrows are black. A few embarrassing days later, my friend had to gently break it to me that "using black eye shadow on eyebrows makes one look like a petni. Everyone knows that." She suggested I use brown instead, subtlety is key apparently. 

I know 'not fitting in when you're different' is no new story, but imagine not fitting in because you don't have eyebrows. While my female friends talked about getting their eyebrows done at the parlour every month, I couldn't relate. I tried that once, but you can't really shape something that doesn't exist. And while they wondered why some boys are "blessed with long eyelashes they don't deserve," I looked at boys too. But I looked at their eyebrows - naturally dark eyebrows that I would never have.

I really should stop feeling cheated by life and just invest in an eyebrow pencil, huh?