Time to Pluck Around

In late January, when a friend emailed to alert me that her favorite brow person was doing a residency uptown not far from where I lived. I laughed. “I have no brows,” I responded. “I belong to the great Carolyn Bessette disappearing eyebrow generation!”

I arrived in New York, young and impressionable, not long after Ms. Bessette married John F. Kennedy Jr. in 1996.

For those of us who had no chance at mimicking Ms. Bessette Kennedy’s “willowy and beautiful” physique (as Time magazine described it) or her “buttery chunks” (how the hairstylist Brad Johns described her highlights), there were her eyebrows. Newsweek, in a somewhat alarming step-by-step guide to her face, detailed Ms. Bessette Kennedy’s barely there brows: “They used to be more of a half-circle. Now they’re straighter with no pronounced arch, probably waxed or tweezed.”

The great eyebrow icon, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy.Credit…Stephane Cardinale/Getty Images

And just like that, off went millions of brows. For some of us, never to return, thanks to overplucking.

I was quickly assured my friend’s brow person, Sania Vucetaj of Sania’s Brow Bar in the Flatiron district, that this was not a problem.