Sand from the Silk Road: Қошҳо!: A grooming delema

In my first week back into my time here in Tajikistan I got the first "You aren't married? But you pluck your eyebrows!" comment. Four and a half years ago, when I first came to Tajikistan I had no idea that my eyebrows would be an topic of such interest and debate, but soon discovered that women here in Tajikistan only start plucking and shaping their eyebrows once they are married, and my neatly groomed eyebrows as a single woman greatly confused them. At the time, I considered letting them grow wild and free, and even tried a time or two but quickly gave in to the urge to tidy those stray hairs.

This time, I am making a resolution… wild and crazy though my eyebrows may soon be, I will not be plucking them! This may seem like a very inconsequential thing to many of you and you might be wondering why on earth I would spend an entire post talking about eyebrows, but here in Tajikistan, eyebrows are a big thing.

It's not so much about letting the world know that I am not married, and certainly not that I hope to snag the attention of a Tajik man (the only one who would see this as a sign of beauty), but it is one more attempt to prove that I am not Russian, and to send a signal that I am a good girl who would never be 'acting as a married woman' and one more attempt to support my claim that I am not the promiscuous woman that they think all westerners are (based on the movies and tv shows we produce). It is not a case of becoming a Tajik (which I will never be), but a case of removing one more barrier and being just slightly less offensive.

But enough about that, along with gold teeth (which are actually decreasing in popularity), the unibrow, natural or artificial, is still very fashionable among women. The bigger and darker the better. There is even a special plant called 'usma' that is crushed up and the dark green juices are used like a sort of henna (applied, sit for a while and wash off) to enhance, darken, and even in some cases connect the eyebrows into a unibrow.