Making new friends can be hard, but keeping friends can be even harder. Last week, I was soft blocked from my e-friend group for my normie looks and my well-adjusted manner. They said I didn’t fit their alt grunge, anti-establishment, postmodern, cyber-cringe aesthetic anymore. This was devastating to the alternative internet persona I had been cultivating all these years. What could I do? I knew that there was only one solution: I had to fully bleach my eyebrows so the alt kids would talk to me again.
Now I know some people are thinking: Wow, how could you succumb to peer pressure? What if your new blonde eyebrows blend in with your skin and made your forehead look huge? Listen, I was tired of being the social outcast of my alternative friends, I started becoming a loner and stopped contributing to our Discord that’s exclusively devoted to new vape tricks. I would stay home and watch all the TikTok content of my former homies ripping bong, skating around, and plastering Hello Kitty ACAB stickers on the skate park.
I felt lonely and ashamed of my basic looks. How could I ever show my face again? I desperately needed to get my alt cred back! And that’s exactly why I bought a box of Clairol and went to work.
Bleaching my eyebrows could have gone horribly wrong. Every time I had regrets about my decision, I remembered all the time we spent making niche meme pages and gentrifying clubs in Brooklyn. Oh, how I missed drinking Four Lokos at underground shows in east Bushwick.
Yes, I did the unthinkable: I bleached my eyebrows so my musician and performance artist friends would take me back into their lives, and it totally worked.
I was so afraid I would look like a goth try hard instead of an effortless e-kid with a love of thrift shopping. But it was the opposite, bleaching my brows put me back at the top of the alt kid pecking order. In a matter of a couple of hours, I went from totally normie to cool alt girl. When I washed the purple shampoo off, I was reborn.
It’s truly crazy the lengths people will go to keep friendship alive that I specifically have done. My skin still hurts from the bleach, but in the end? Totally worth it.
