Raised Eyebrows and Demented in Dubai

Was in Dubai airport on route for South Africa this summer and, apart from finding Emirates Airways great for providing a plentiful supply of food in the plane,  I discovered that if you have a long lay over (mine was nine hours)  the airline also provides food vouchers.   I took advantage of the vouchers to eat my way through the long night hours at the airport.

 

After looking at all the expensive crap for sale at the airport I gradually grew tired of all this commercial excess. I discovered that in Dubai airport there are free showers in the ladies. Immediately, I hastened to a supermarket to buy toiletries and then spent probably two hours in the shower. Travelling makes you feel so grubby and this was the perfect way to renew body and spirit.

 

Refreshed, I then noticed a weird thing about women's eyebrows in the airport. It may have been tiredness, fatigue can make you see things in an odd way. After all, there is a reason they use sleep deprivation to torture and break people!  Women seemed to have done crazy stuff with their eyebrows here.  They look as if they have been shaven off and then drawn on again in ludicrous positions on their face.  It can be forgiven in the elderly, after all mistakes can happen but this seemed too common and widespread to be explained in terms of creeping senility.  No, this appears to be deliberate.  The eyebrows are square and horizontal as if underlying their brows or shaped like demented brackets over the eyes.

Perhaps this is thought of as an artful way to draw attention to a perceived asset?  The more I encountered the more it felt like every female in the airport had contrived to frighten a tired and sleep deprived Colette.  This was surely the way madness begins.

  

I can remember wandering the corridors of Dubai airport in the early hours finding each weird eyebrow feeling like a physical assault from zombie creatures.  I began to want to scream, “What the Hell is going on!”  Now, well rested and at home I can look back with vague amusement that it disturbed me so much.