Please Me, Tweeze Me

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Men, can we talk? The unibrow went out with the mastodon. The trendiest Japanese are plucking their eyebrows into razor-thin lines, and they're painting their faces too: 60% of young men polled in Tokyo said they would use an eyebrow pencil. "I use eyeliner to make my eyes appear bigger when I go out," says a computer engineer nicknamed "Tomo."

The follicle fetish isn't new. Samurai films from 40 years ago show that eyebrows as bristly as caterpillars once perched on Japanese male foreheads. Shiseido, a Tokyo-based cosmetics firm, created an eyebrow kit for men in 1996. The company says sales have grown steadily since. Japanese men's cosmetic line Gatsby had double-digit domestic sales last year.

In Japan, "beauty has never been polarized as a feminine attribute," says Mark McLelland, a sociology professor at the University of Queensland. Last month, a high school student was banned from a judo competition north of Tokyo. Tournament officials were put off by his heavily tweezed face, which they said was "too intimidating." Butch is in the eye of the beholder.