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mercredi 28 septembre 2016

What It Was Like Growing Up With No Eyebrows

Many women grew up with the typical trials and tribulations of being a teenager: hitting puberty, developing facial and underarm hair, and working on a daily basis to not completely mortify ourselves. Easier said than done, right? But what if in addition to all this, you dealt with a disorder that caused you to pull out your own hair - specifically your eyebrows and eyelashes?

YouTube star and actress Arden Rose has trichotillomania, an impulse control disorder which gives you the compulsive urge to pull out your hair. For Arden, it was directly linked to stress, similar to biting your nails or the skin off your cuticles. It's estimated that 2.5 million people have trich - a surprising number if you think about it. "Once you have a disorder, you learn to hide it very well," said Arden. "It was a comfort zone for me, but also, being embarrassed about something . . . you go home, you feel bad about yourself, all you want is a comfort zone again. It's a vicious cycle," she said.

She was 13 when it started happening, as a result of wearing coats of mascara. "I would put loads of mascara on, and I loved pulling the clumps out of my mascara. It got to the point where I was like, 'if I keep applying mascara, I can pull out all these clumps.'" She also did it with brow gel, which resulted in both sparse lashes and nonexistent eyebrows. In addition to having a genetic predisposition for the disorder, not fitting in at school also contributed to her stress. "I didn't have a great friend group growing up, I didn't relate to a lot of girls my age. I felt like I was on a different path than a lot of other people," she said.

You never get rid of the disorder. Instead, you do your best to contain it. For Arden, that means having her boyfriend keep her accountable and building up a support system through YouTube. As for her advice for those getting bullied about their looks? "The main motto is 'stop giving a crap.' Ultimately, people are all narcissistic. They care about themselves, the way they look, they care about what you think about them. They don't really care about what's going on with your face. No one actually cares, so you shouldn't care in turn."

Check out Arden's full episode of Pretty Unfiltered, and find her on go90's series Mr. Student Body President, as well as her YouTube channel.

mercredi 28 septembre 2016