Jeffery Lyle Segal shows us his photo album of “before” and “after” snapshots. Almost all of his clients seem to share an obscure American malady of the 1990s: substandard eyebrows. It appears there’s an epidemic.
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I enter the back room of the Lincoln Park library with caution because I fear a gathering of the horribly disfigured, the hopelessly vain, and paramedics. But it’s just Segal and another guy, who looks like a workingman, about 50, short sleeves. Hairy arms and a thick Eastern European accent. He doesn’t appear to be among what one might call the cosmetically challenged. Must be a paramedic.
Like who? Well, for example, he says, maybe the blind, who can’t see themselves putting on makeup. “Someone’s hands may be arthritic, they may shake. They might be allergic to cosmetics.” Permanent makeup is in demand among female athletes, he says, because when they work up a sweat their makeup runs. This way they don’t have to worry about it. They can run a marathon and still look smashing.
But almost all the people we flip past in this photo album are eyebrow cases. Here’s a woman about 45 or so, the wrinkles are beginning to show. She came to Segal because she thought her eyebrows made her eyes look too far apart, so he sketched in a few more permanent hairs, gave them a different arc.
“I should have turned that man away,” he says. “His problems went much deeper than his eyebrows. He wanted to concentrate all his emotional problems in one small area. He didn’t need me. He needed a headshrinker.”
