So the trend in 2017 is to look like the kid people beat up in middle school…?

In the past few decades, we’ve gotten to the stage where we’ve started regressing back and recycling beauty and fashion trends of the past. 70’s and 60’s fashion was big for a while, and now we seem to have crossed the threshold from 90’s to early 2000’s, which brings us to today’s trend.

Everything I hated about myself in middle school is now the it look of 2017, and I don’t know how I feel about it.

I was in sixth grade when my mom first showed me how to use tweezers, thus beginning my daily losing battle with the two caterpillars taking up residence above my eyes. My monthly trips to Sylvia, a heavy-set waxist who liked to play classical music while she was pouring hot wax onto my face (as if that would somehow make me feel relaxed despite her tearing out my hair), became a staple of my adolescence. Basically, I had the brows of Mia Thermopolis pre-Paulo, without the comfort of secretly being a princess.

Enter 2017.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BS3S-K3BWb5/?tagged=thickeyebrows

Suddenly everyone’s throwing out their tweezers, declaring this the year of the brow. People are stuffing their bags with pomade and pencils in an attempt to emulate the thick, Selma Hayek eyebrows I spent a decade trying to eliminate. At peak crazy, people were literally adding hair to their eyebrows via extensions and feathering. As great as it felt to see the thing I spent all of middle school hating suddenly becoming en vogue, I couldn’t help feeling like the whole thing was a little unfair, like when people who don’t have vision problems wear fake glasses to look fashionable.

And then came the freckle craze. Back in middle school, I wouldn’t have bet any money, not even the $4 I spent on Wet N Wild foundation to cover mine, that freckles would ever become a beauty trend, let alone that people would start paying hundreds of dollars to get them tattooed onto their faces.

And it’s not just beauty. Those mom jeans I was too embarrassed to wear in middle school are now being featured on runways across the globe, paired with the New Balance sneakers you made fun of your gym teacher for wearing. That weird girl who was obsessed with unicorns all the way through eighth grade? She’s got the last laugh, since you’re the one dying your hair pastel pink and rubbing rainbow highlighter on your cheeks.

Again, it’s great that these features are becoming more socially acceptable, but I’m not sure how to feel about the fact that the world has taken the things that made middle-schoolers self-conscious and co-opted them for the sake of fashion. It seems unfair for the girl who got bullied for wanting to be a mermaid at age 12 that suddenly Forever21 is selling tshirts with her mantra on them and making bank for doing it.

I guess the silver lining in all of this is that there’s a 13-year-old somewhere out there with bushy eyebrows and a penchant for mermaid culture who’s not self-conscious about it in the slightest. Bad news for Sylvia’s business, but good news for the rest of society. Then again, there might be a girl out there worrying about her overly-thin brows, and to that person I say this: beauty is fleeting, and random, and arbitrary, and when you’re 21, they’ll probably be cool again.

So it’s probably better if you just dgaf.

@TheTab