Dear Prudence,
My boyfriend is an otherwise neatly turned out and well-groomed man in his early 50s, but in the past few years his eyebrow hairs have started to get out of control. They are long, they are conspicuous, and they stick out, distractingly, at weird angles sometimes. I know that many men regularly get their brows clipped to manageable lengths at the barber, but he started cutting his own hair during COVID and hasn’t gone back for a professional trim since. So when I first noticed it, I asked whether he ever considered trimming his brows, and he got OFFENDED, like I had insulted his very soul. I dropped it, and figured that I needed to just learn to live with it. But it’s so weird, especially because he is meticulous about removing his ear hair, and grooming his other body hair, and I just wonder—is long eyebrow hair a touchy subject for men in general, or just this man? It’s not like I was being hypercritical, I just didn’t hesitate to mention it the first time because none of my previous boyfriends have considered it a big deal—one guy I dated even asked me to trim his brows for him since he was too farsighted to do it himself.
—The Brows Have It