In Gogol’s Ukranian short story “”St. John’s Eve,” he describes a particular beautiful girl as “a dark-browed daughter.” It made me think of similar descriptions of beautiful girls in Arabian Nights.

The really pretty girls in Scheherazade’s tales had faces that looked like the moon and one long, black eyebrow atop their eyes. Ukraine is fairly close to the Muslim world with Turkey sharing the Black Sea to the south. They could very well have shared similar ideas of beauty.

Sir Richard Burton’s notes in the back of his translation of Arabian Nights give a little thought to the joined brow. It seems that in Burton’s time, the Arab world saw it as a sign of distinction and beauty. But in the western world people thought it was the sign of being a werewolf or possibly a vampire.

And just so you know, according to Wikipedia, the word “unibrow” has officially made it into the dictionary, but the technical term is “synophrys.” Who wants to talk about a “synophrys,” though? Not me.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 10th, 2006 at 7:40 pm and is filed under Asia, Russia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.