From the "seemed like a good idea at the time" department

One of my eyebrows is currently a bit dusty rose.
Ever since the woman at Sephora darkened my eyebrows and showed me a whole new world of eye makeup drama, I have been trying to figure out how to make my brows darker in the most natural, least stupid-looking way possible. I'd been using my fancy slanty make-up brush and a combination of two eyeshadows: one was too dark, the other too orangey, but mixed they were juuuuust riiiiight. Still, the eyeshadow itself would clump a bit and was clearly not meant to be a brow powder. So I bought brow powder, but it looked drawn-on and weird. My mom suggested I get this new eyebrow mascara stuff she'd heard about and got it for me at Walgreens. This definitely darkened my brows in a natural-looking way, but I discovered a new problem: once darkened, my eyebrows are all bushy! Jilly-Jilly-No-Brow (ok, no one has ever called me that) needed to tweeze! So I tried tweezing, but I had no idea what I was doing or how to shape, since my blondeness never learned tweezing skills in junior high like the rest of the vain girly world. I'd seen HairOff (not to be confused with Face/Off) eyebrow stencils at Walgreens and looked up online how and if they could be used as tweezing guides. Sounded simple enough, so I bought eyebrow stencils that even came with a FREE! eyebrow pencil. That takes us to tonight. Splendid.
I follow the instructions on how to place the eyebrow stencils very carefully.

1. FIND THE INNER POINT: To find the beginning point, lay your eyebrow pencil
alongside your nose, pointing straight up. Mark the point on your brow a finger's
width above the bridge of your nose. Do the same for the other brow.

Easy enough.

2. FIND THE OUTER POINT: Place your pencil diagonally from the tip of your nose to the outer edge of your eye. Mark the point where the pencil hits your brow bone. Do the same for the other brow.

This required more guesswork, as there are an infinite number of possible slopes for the diagonal of my pencil, but I just used my existing brow and the vaguely helpful illustration as a guide for where to end the thing.

3. PLACE STENCILS OVER YOUR BROWS: Peel one stencil off the backing...Line up the inner edge of the cutout with the inner point you marked in Step 1. Line the outer point of the cutout with the outer point you marked in Step 2.

Problem: my eyebrows, from end to end, are smaller than the stencil. Do I go by my Step 1 dots? My Step 2 dots? Average it out? Squish the stencil a bit so it has to fit?
I ended up basically using my Step 1 dot and the natural arch of my brows as my guide, then shifted them slightly so they were more symmetrical. It looked pretty good, and I planned to err on the conservative side of my plucking, anyway. I drew my right brow on with the pencil and removed the stencil. It looked ok, so I started on the left one. My FREE! eyebrow pencil broke at the tip and I didn't feel like looking for the sharpener, but I figured I had a cheap lip liner pencil right there that would do the job as a tweezing guide. So I had one brown and one reddish eyebrow all stenciled out, but the right one somehow looked flatter, so I repositioned the stencil and redrew it in lip liner. I looked funny as hell with my rosy red eyebrows, but the shape seemed good, so I started plucking. Plucking fucking hurts, particularly when you're going after chunks, but I got all the little blonde strays and washed my face to see how I'd done. The eyebrows stayed red. Lots of scrubbing and soap and eye makeup later, the right one is still pinker than just the rubbing would have caused. Having removed hair that's normally almost invisible, I looked otherwise the same. I put in the eyebrow mascara stuff, which we got in the lightest shade. They look like boring little eyebrows. The dramatic arch of the stencil doesn't really show up, and (once darkened) I found a few strays.

Another round of scrubbing tomorrow should remove the remaining lip liner (or maybe my eyes need to eat something...food tends to wipe lip liner off very quickly) and maybe I'll play more with brow powder or perhaps a heavier coating of eyebrow mascara.

So was the whole thing worth it? I don't know...was it worth reading my entire account of the experience?