The pandemic took so much—least of all, my eyebrows, which I pulled out constantly and compulsively due to a condition called trichotillomania.
Reentering the World With Anxiety Eyebrows
It started as a pet name for the approximately three (3) hairs scattered across my otherwise-empty brow bones: my Anxiety Eyebrows. What happened to the rest of them, you ask? Oh, I pulled them out. Mhmm, all of them. Hundreds of hairs, over and over, fingers animated by some unconscious, unignorable force—by some part of my brain that swore freeing the exact right hair from the exact right follicle would soothe the stress-induced ache in my pores.
I do this constantly and compulsively; weekly if not daily. My rational mind knows that picking doesn’t “work,” of course. I know the added stress of annihilating my own eyebrows (What did I do? Why am I like this? Should I get bangs?) will provoke another episode. I know the ache will come back and my brows might not. Doesn’t matter. Reason is no match for the fleeting euphoria of ripping a hair from its root!
I only mention it because my mental illness is trending. (That is an objectively absurd statement, yes, but we live in absurdist times.) Research published in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology recently revealed a pandemic-related increase in self-reported instances of trichotillomania—the technical term for the obsessive, unrelenting urge to pull your hair out.
This news hasn’t gotten the attention of, say, maskne or the Botox boom, and I have to imagine it’s because trichotillomania (seemingly) doesn’t lend itself to a cutesy little catchphrase. Or maybe it’s because compulsively picking your eyebrows clean in an attempt to alleviate a phantom pain in your hair follicles seems like an unspeakably strange thing to do. In any case, it’s time to take my pet name public and normalize the defining beauty look of These Unprecedented Times: Anxiety Eyebrows.
“Trich,” as it’s known in the picking community, is a Body Focused Repetitive Behavior (BFRB). The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders defines it as the “recurrent pulling out of one’s hair, resulting in hair loss” despite “repeated attempts to decrease or stop hair pulling.” This isn’t over-plucking every so often, says Dr. Amy Wechsler, a psychodermatologist who is double-board-certified in dermatology and psychiatry. “The damage makes [the] disorder,” she emphasizes. “It’s causing scarring, it’s causing hair loss, and it’s not easy to stop.” (The same goes for other BFRBs, like dermatillomania, or skin-picking, and onychophagia, better known as nail-biting; both of which are also on the rise.) Sufferers tend to favor a specific area—their scalp, their eyelashes, their bikini line, wherever. Many, like me, take their urges out on their brows.
This story originally appeared on: Vogue - Author:Jessica DeFino
