Dear Fellow Alopecian / Eyebrow Loss Sufferer,
If you're sick of having no hair from Alopecia, feeling depressed from having no eyebrows whatsoever, and you want to regain your confidence, happiness, and you want to be proud of what you look like again, this will be the most important page you ever read.
Here is why: My name is Jason Berndt and 10 short years ago, I lost all of my hair, including eyebrows, eyelashes, head and body hair. Over a short six-month period between the winter of 2009 and summer 2010, I was diagnosed with a rare autoimmune disease, Alopecia Universalis, which is correlated with high levels of stress.
After my first year of rigorous military training coupled with an Engineering degree at the Royal Military College of Canada, all of my hair, including my eyebrows and eyelashes, fell out in clumps.
After losing all of my hair, and having no eyebrows left, I could hardly recognize myself in photos or in the mirror...
I remember when I first lost my eyebrows, I would lay awake at night, staring at the ceiling in in my college dorm bed and wondering what the future would hold for me in terms of relationships, social situations...
My confidence was plummeting to an all-time low.
I could barely stand looking at myself for years, and I always felt self-conscious, embarrassed and depressed about the way I looked. And I knew that everyone else was looking at me like an outsider...
Needless to say, I certainly stopped posting new photos of myself of myself on Facebook…
It’s one thing to be bald – it’s another thing to have no eyebrows.
As I’m sure you’ve come to notice, and probably your peers have let you know as well (or they just joked about behind your back) something looks very different about someone with no eyebrows...
In the past decade, people in my peer group have made all kinds of jokes, saying I looked like Gollum from Lord of the Rings, an alien, or a dozen other things they thought were funny. And I certainly didn’t find it entertaining having to live day-to-day with that as an identity…
Over the next decade, I continued with this dreadful situation, training to fly and operationally flying CF-18 fighter jets in the Canadian Air Force, with no improvement in my eyebrows. Briefly, my hair partially grew back, and then fell out as quickly as it came.
As I searched over the past 10 years for solutions which specifically addressed my eyebrow hair loss, it became disappointingly clear that very few existed.
It seemed like time after time, I would go into a place like MAC cosmetics or Sephora, and ask associates what my options were to provide realistic looking, albeit fake eyebrows.
It felt like an odd question to ask, and for some reason I felt really embarrassed and ashamed when I was speaking with them.
Now, I bet you can imagine, or have experienced it yourself: there were a lot of blank looks. Some associates would even have to ask their managers what they could do to help me.
However, it was always no luck, or maybe they would suggest trying an eyebrow pencil. Thanks, but it's kind of difficult and time-consuming to apply realistic looking eyebrows daily with a pencil! And what about when I sweat at the gym or go swimming???
I actually did briefly (for about a year) try the pencil route – and as I predicted, they always looked drawn-on and fake.
Even worse, these drawn-on eyebrows would smear off even if I started to sweat the smallest bit – forget even considering hitting the beach, pool, or hot tub! Then, of course, they would come off at the end of the day in the shower, and I would have to re-apply them another 2 or 3 times the next day. What a waste of time.
I experimented with glue and tape-on "eyebrow-wigs" as well. And I have to say – no dice!
The eyebrow-wigs I wore were always far too intense, bushy-looking and would fall off at the worst or most embarrassing of times.
In-fact, an eyebrow wig once fell off of my face and blocked my vision while I was executing high G-force maneuvers while piloting a fighter jet. Seriously!
And I don’t even want to think about how many eyebrow wigs I’ve lost in public hot tubs, only to realize once I got back to the changeroom that I had been missing an eyebrow the entire time I was chatting with quasi strangers and they said nothing. Talk about embarrassing!
In living this immeasurable difficulty first-hand that people with no eyebrows face, I felt a need to find an eyebrow solution. The eyebrow solution had 4 hard requirements.
