It took me years, but now I finally love my thick and bushy eyebrows

• My dad is Indian, and my mom is Puerto Rican and Italian.
• I have thick eyebrows, which weren't trendy when I was growing up in the late '90s.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, pencil-thin eyebrows were all the rage.

Women and men alike were shaping the hairs above their eyelids, and waxing and threading were on the rise. Some even laser-removed their brows completely, tattooing skinny twine in their absence to achieve permanency with what they deemed the definitive style.

Lines were drawn between those who manicured and people like me who couldn't care less about excessive grooming.

I didn't ask for caterpillar-thick eyebrows. I blame my Indian immigrant father or my Puerto Rican and Italian American mother. It took me a while to appreciate them.

I looked different from my classmates

Once my body started to sprout, things got awkward. If my curly hair, "foreign"-sounding name, and olive skin didn't provide enough material for my mostly white classmates to make fun of me, the two easy targets on my face did.

One evening, when I was about 13 years old, I snuck into the bathroom and opened my older brother Ravi's drawer — the one I was specifically told not to touch, at the threat of being punched by my even-hairier sibling — while he wasn't home. I pulled out his electric buzzer and attempted to gently crop the hedges hanging above my eyeballs.

"Careful, careful," I repeated to myself.

I tried holding the trimmer steady, but my hand was trembling from both nervousness and the device's vibrations. As I lost control, I felt the hot metal in my palm heading north, plowing down hairs in its path like a tractor in a corn maze.

I attempted to fix them and realign the remaining patches to maintain some semblance of shape and continuity, but my efforts seemed to only worsen them as they became thinner and uneven. I tried to convince myself that I looked presentable. I stepped out of the bathroom to show my mom my new facial style. She shrieked. "Oh, no. Honey, what did you do to your face?" It wasn't the reaction I was hoping for.

People made even more fun of me

This wasn't the first time I'd presented my mother with a hideous weed-whacking job. I'd already experimented enough with my hair, picking it until it reached Chia Pet status, as well as attempting to fade the sides myself, which turned my hairline into a bowl shape. She learned to deal with my experimenting, but kids my age weren't so kind.

The day after my brow debacle, as I walked through my school's halls, I was a laughingstock for yet another reason. Points and stares at my failed brow shaping led to more mockery. Kids were hand-gesturing a razor moving back and forth above their own eyes, yelling out, "St-st-stupid sh-sh-shaving sch-sch-schmuck." I felt foolish. The embarrassment was overwhelming.

I learned to love my thick eyebrows

It took years to find the best shapes that worked for my face. Eventually, by my early 20s, I gave up the experimentation and learned to leave them alone. I learned to keep my grooming at a minimum, with only light touch-ups of excess hairs surrounding my brows. After a while, I even grew to embrace them as a distinctive facial feature.

In recent years, as beauty trends have drastically changed, I've even started to receive compliments on my eyebrows.

"You have a robust, natural look," a woman recently said to me while I was shopping in a local Old Navy.

I was dumbfounded. Something I was once ashamed of was now being admired with me barely making an effort. If I could have just told my teenage self that all fads came to pass and that "grotesque" might transform into "en vogue," I could have saved myself an unnecessary amount of personal shame.

Raj Tawney is a writer who explores race, identity, and food from his Indian, Puerto Rican, and Italian American perspective. His memoir, "Colorful Palate: A Flavorful Journey Through a Mixed American Experience," was released Tuesday.