((PKG)) UNIBROW
((Banner: A Fierce Brow))
((VOA Russian))
((Reporter: Elena Wolf))
((Camera: Irina Khokhlova))
((Map: New York City, New York))
((NATS))
((Shari Loeffler, Creative Collaborator))
I spent my entire life always trying to hide from who I was. I had a unibrow. This is the face that I was born with and for some reason that visual representation that was on my face like a flag, that I could not strip away, was something that really bothered me.
((NATS))
((Shari Loeffler, Creative Collaborator))
I am a creative collaborator and so there's no way to define me. I just create off of anything that I'm interested in. So, whether that's in the art world, in fashion, in modelling, in farming, in surfing, in fitness, as a mother. I can't really put myself in sort of one box.
((NATS))
((Shari Loeffler, Creative Collaborator))
I live in New York with my three beautiful girls, Scarlett, Savannah and Celine, and my husband Nicholas. And I was born and raised in America but my family is from Iran. And, so I always grew up with this duality of my Persian heritage also mixed in with this American culture as I'm first generation.
((NATS))
((Shari Loeffler, Creative Collaborator))
So, I always grew up with this tension of, you know, who do I belong to, where do I belong to. I always, kind of, felt different and lonely. I grew up feeling like the way I looked and the way I felt and my background was the absolute worst. So, it took me until becoming a mother, believe it or not, for me to face these things, and I thought to myself, if I don't deal with this now, and if she doesn't see me embracing myself for who I am and how I look, she never will, because as we know, children absorb every single thing that we do.
So, that experiment started by October for Halloween. I had grown successfully most of it back in. I went as Frida for Halloween that year.
((NATS))
((Shari Loeffler, Creative Collaborator))
What I love about Frida, an entity and an energy force that is just so comfortable with who she is. She can have a unibrow. She can have a mustache. She can have men as her lovers or women as her lovers. She can create. She can dress how she wants.
((NATS))
((Shari Loeffler, Creative Collaborator))
One of my closest friends said to me, you know, you've never been more confident. There's something different about you, the way you act. I think you should just start an Instagram and talk about this. And I said, why would I ever do that? I have no interest in doing that. And she says, I have a name for you. I think you should name it ‘My Fierce Brow’. That's kind of how this evolution started and very shortly thereafter, off like a very tiny Instagram with not much of a following, I started to get international press calling me. And I just couldn't believe that something that I actually did for myself, for my children, would appeal to so many people.
Now, it's really opened up many doors for me creatively because having this face gave a comfort to me to let go all out of my perfectionism tendencies that I had. I became more comfortable with my weight. I became more comfortable with pursuing my dreams. I became more comfortable with sharing and talking about the things that happened to me as a child with my friends and family and, like, I started to do workshops with teens to talk about embracing yourself for your identity. So, like, this visual representation of how I look actually was like this pathway that opened up many other aspects of my life for me. And, I think, the unibrow is just a symbol for me of an exploration of your own identity. And, I think, everyone, kind of, has, like, their own unibrow story. It's just a matter of finding what that is for you.
((NATS))
