This article originally appeared in the June 2016 issue of ELLE.

In the midst of this Chinese zodiac Year of the Monkey, my monkey-see, monkey-do nature—as in "Do you…"—has hit critical mass, escalating to strangers: "Do you floss?" "Do you believe in God?" "Do you think this elevator will get stuck?" "Do you like my hair?" "Do you read your horoscope?" "Do you have a good psychiatrist?" "Do you see what I see?" I have a question for you: Why is everyone avoiding me?

Traits of those born in a simian year include lively and mischievous, curious and cunning. (I might also add excellent groomers.) These are facts. It says so right here on my place mat at Big Wong King Chinese restaurant on Mott Street in New York's Chinatown.

Me, I was born in the Year of the Ox. We bovine kind are said to be resolute, independent, honest, thick-skinned, and in my case, moo-dy and seeking asylum in India.

But to quote Charles Darwin, we're all chimps, and when it comes to grooming, I'm top banana. Just ask Julie Creamer, my junior-high best friend. As a budding Beauty Adventuress, I started plucking Jules's eyebrows in the seventh grade, and she rode that perfect arch all the way to being crowned Stevens High School Homecoming Queen. Word of my mad (cow) skills spread, and soon I was pruning overgrown newbies before, during, and after class; I even reserved an Urgent Care chair in the cafeteria.

Come college, I bartered my brow talent for everything from class notes to beer to mixtapes, bonding with my dorm mates over the intimate act of shaping their brows, serving up a shot of liquid courage, giggling over the pain of the pluck!—all the while trading secrets and dreams and fears, loving that we were such girls. It was a socialist sorority, walk-ins welcome!

That's how I bonded with my editor Liesl lo these many years ago. She'd just landed at Premiere magazine, and between "hello" and "nice to meet you," I plucked her from obscurity. She's been editing my stories and I've been editing her eyebrows ever since. Or so I thought.

I pop into her ELLE office, and when she swivels around in her chair, my tweezers fall from my hand—Liesl has cheated on me! Her brows are skinny, some 50 hairs underweight; it's like looking at Carmen Miranda without a fruit basket on her head. Seeing me, she begins to cry.

"Liesl, who did this to you?"

"I did this to me! I was doing a little maintenance, and next thing I knew, I was clicking castanets!" She blows her nose. "Can you fix me?"

That would demand a high level of training, which would require me to go undercover at the top-ranked school for lead sales aestheticians (LSAs) seeking an advanced degree: Benefit Brow University. (Yes, it exists.)

Liesl's face lights up: "It's a Beauty Adventure!" We call Laurie, ELLE's features director and head of special ops, who arrives with a ticket to San Francisco, an intel sheet, and an exact replica of a Benefit business card: Holly Millea, LSA; Brow Bar Harold Square, NYC. "That will get you in the door," Laurie says. "From there, you're on your own."

Before I depart, I tap the inimitable Dennis Gross, MD, for dermatological recon, as in, Why do we have eyebrows, anyway?

"They don't really serve a purpose," Gross says. "Once upon a time, they did. They were longer, more bushy; they protected the eyes from windstorms in the desert, or some environmental event that humans were exposed to. We now live in a world where eyelashes can handle that responsibility. Personally, I think the function of eyebrows is a vestige."

That said, he says, "One benefit that is prehistoric in nature and may still be the case today is that eyebrows are a sign of fertility and virility. The animal world wants to mate with a partner who has signs of superior DNA. Eyebrows are one of the physical features seen as attributes that make you more attractive to the opposite sex." Go big, or go home alone.

By the time I land in San Fran, I have the answers to the Brow U exam beyond memorized—I have them written on my arm: "7" (number of weeks to regrow a tweezed eyebrow hair); "0.16 mm" (rate of daily growth); "3–4 weeks" (eyebrow life-span); "2003" (first Benefit Brow Bar opens); "1,800" (Brow Bars worldwide)….

Flashing my faux business card at the front desk, I catch the elevator with a gaggle of girls and a guy named Pablo to the 22nd floor. "Where's your pink?" someone asks. Pink?

"You're supposed to wear some pink," says another. "Did you forget?" My tweezers are pink! "Here, you can borrow my necklace," says a blond bohemian beauty, bedazzling me with a sparkly vintage piece. "I'm Juliette, by the way."

A dozen of us in all, we fill out name tags while waiting for the professor. Pablo suggests, "Let's introduce ourselves, and tell something you've never told anyone else." (I am not making this up.) "I haven't had sex with my husband since I got braces," Paula says. "I have a wild hair on my chest I have to pluck," Juliette admits. "I just got out of prison," I confess.

Before we finish, Jill Gould, Brow U's vice president of education, North America, bounds into the room, pinked out from head to heels. "Buckle in and clutch your pearls!" orders the petite dynamo. "Benefit is the largest employer of aestheticians worldwide, and you're here because you're the best of the best." I'm so proud!

"Two thousand sixteen is the year of the brow! It's a tsunami and we've got to ride that wave!" Jill cheers. The LSAs clap like crazy.

The Master of Brows curriculum includes Anatomy of a Brow, Consulting, Tinting and Waxing, Brow Rehab, Best Tools, and Sanitation and Hygiene. Jill starts with BrowFluencers, a history of size and style from Queen Elizabeth I's browlessness (1550) and Frida Kahlo's unibrow (1950s) to Twiggy's twigs (1960s), Brooke Shields's branches (1980s), Gwen Stefani's No Doubt pencilings (1990s), and the current craze best captured by Cara Delevingne, whose breadth of brow is self-sustaining. "They groom themselves," she told TMZ. "Like a cat that licks their own fur."

For those of us who are less purrfect, we move on to the geometrics of Brow Mapping—the key to saving Liesl. Jill picks Pablo to demonstrate on me. Using a long cotton swab, he takes three measurements. From the dimple where the nostril begins, he measures straight up to the brow line and, using an eyebrow pencil, marks the spot with a dot; that's the point where my brow should begin. Next he measures from the bottom of my outer nostril, through the center of my pupil, and up to the brow; that's where my arch should be highest—another dot. Finally, he gauges from the outer nostril to the outer corner of my eye up to the brow; this is where my brow should end. A final dot.

I fell short at both ends, but my arch? To be rivaled! Pablo connects the hairless spots between dots using Brow Zings (a compact with colored wax and powder) and hands me a mirror. Paging Darwin: I'm the missing link!

Just as my faux-full brows were growing on me, Jill sends us all on a map quest. I am assigned to map Maci, an LSA from Sacramento and a Sharon Stone–circa–Basic Instinct type, which inspires me to take her straw-blond brows dark brown with a sexy high arch. "You must do tons of brows at the Herald Square Brow Bar," she says, sighing, like I'm so lucky. "Mmm-hmm," I reply, filling up with liar's remorse as I'm filling in her brows.

I finish her killer look with High Brow highlighter beneath the arch. She shrieks with delight when I hand her a mirror and she throws her arms around me, jumping us up and down—"I love them! Love them!"—making me feel like the best of the best of the best!

Jill commends my work as "a very daring success," and now comes a quiz. What are the three distinct elements of a Benefit Brow? I got this: "High arch, square front, tapered tail."

"Very good, Holly. Okay, who can tell me the purpose of a square front?" I call out: "To slim the nose!" Correct.

Jill: "There are five steps of service, Juliette; what are they?" "Release form, consultation, service, styling the service (product recommendations), and rebooking."

"And how long do these five steps take?" Jill asks scanning the room. I've turned into Tracy Flick. My arm shoots up and before she can call on me, I scream, "Twenty minutes!"

"Look!" Juliette squeals. "The answers are written on her arm!"

Jill marches over to me, demanding my ID: "H-a-r-o-l-d Square?" Busted! Laurie should stick to counterfeiting money.

I'm soon on the red-eye back to New York, unable to sleep on the plane, the strains of "Beauty School Dropout" looping in my brain. No graduation day for you…indeed. Determined to finish my higher education, I land, shower, and head directly to Saks Fifth Avenue, where, on the fifth floor, BlinkBrow Bar is located; Emma Watson and Lady Gaga have been rebrowed-while-browsing here.

I meet Sabah Feroz, a Kardashian doppelgänger who sums me up: "I don't think you're a pencil kind of person. I would tint your brows to bring the color out. Tint first, then we thread."

As she applies the dark vegetable dye using a Popsicle-like stick, I tell her of Liesl's dilemma. "We do a service called Build-a-Brow; we glue hair to your natural hair, or we apply it to your skin. So even if you have no eyebrow, we can actually give you one—you can look exactly like Kim Kardashian! She's the most popular request. But you can bring any picture in and get anybody's eyebrows."

Removing the muck, Sabah exclaims: "You have a lot of eyebrows! Really thick!" She hands me the mirror. "They were so blond, but now you can see them. You needed tinting, nothing else."

Sabah pulls out a spool of white cotton thread, breaks off a long piece, and, sticking one end in her mouth, wraps the rest of it around her hands in a complicated cat's-cradle kind of way. "I tell customers, 'If you're waiting for the pain, it will hurt more,' " she says. Before I can wrap my mind around her string theory, she's uprooted the outliers with deadly precision, leaving me perfectly threadbare below the brow and baby-skin soft.

The finishing touch is a trim. Sabah combs my eyebrows straight up and, with tiny scissors, trims the ones extending beyond the brow line.

I love her handiwork, but there's more to be done. Because, in light of my new dark brows, my tails now appear too weak, strangely spermlike. I catch a cab to SoHo's Browhaus for a little Brow Resurrection, the semipermanent tinting technique that's long been all the rage in Asia—known there as "brow embroidery"—and that's making its mark here…on me.

Lying nearly flat on a contraption that's a cross between a massage bed and a dentist's chair, tapping my toes to the techno beat of—what else?—haus music, I'm looking up into the face of Jady, Browhaus's senior brow architect, who agrees my ends are "spotty" and brushes my eyebrows downward to sketch guidelines into my skimpy tails, beginning midbrow and working outward. "Everyone asks for Kendall Jenner," Jady says. "It used to be Kim Kardashian." While they still want a strong brow, "now they want a wispier, natural look. They want me to go outside the line—even under the brow."

Numbing cream is applied. Waiting for the deep freeze to set in, Jady mixes and matches the dye and shows me the sealed single-use blade she'll use to puncture the skin. It resembles an X-Acto knife blade but is actually comprised of 14 teensy needles. As she cleans my brows, I grow anxious. Will there be blood? "Sometimes a little. It shouldn't be gushing." She's kidding, right? "Just little beads!"

Here we go. With the first microblading "hair stroke," I flinch. "A little hurty?" Jady asks, offering more numbing cream. A lot of hurty, actually, but I opt to tough it out, and as she carries on one by one by one, the pain lessens; it feels weirdly good.

About 20 minutes later, she's finished with her short cuts and she's now applying the pigment, pressing it into the skin and wiping off the excess. Scabs will form over the etchings, and the skin will get irresistibly itchy, but in about a week, the scabs will fall off, leaving a brow reborn.

All in all, seven "hairs" have been added to my left eyebrow, nine to my right. "It is normal if some of it doesn't take or it's too light, so don't be alarmed," Jady says. "We adjust them. You can always add and adjust, but you can't take away. So it's better to have less than more."

A free touch-up comes with the cost: $925 for full brows; $725 for lengthening. Lasting up to two years, the tattoo fades into obscurity, or more likely, into an addiction. I'm loving this look. It's pricey, but you get a lot of brow for your buck, and you save tons of time no longer having to do them every day yourself. Then again, there's something to be said about doing them yourself, if yourself is me and you're doing them for others.

A week later, I'm throwing a throwback party to the days when my dorm was the original brow bar and I was the browtender.

Liesl comes early for a private Brow Mapping, holding off on anything more permanent…unless her brows don't grow back. "Don't even joke about that!" she says, giving me a hug and handing me a bottle of bubbly. Joanna, Germaine, Jenny, and Allie arrive, and someone else I'm oh-so-happy to see—Juliette, LSA, NYC—who'd Facebook-friended me with an apology after my Benefit booting. With her is a Zac Efron look-alike. "Holly, meet Jared Bailey." Jared Bailey! Benefit's global brow authority, here to revoke my license. And I don't even have one. "He has a present for you." And that's how I got my pink diploma: HOLLY MILLEA, MASTER OF BROWS. Signed by none other than Jill Gould.

I grab Germaine and show off my mapping skills. Unable to help himself, Jared starts mapping Allie—a self-proclaimed "eyebrow virgin." "Allie's eyebrows are unruly and misbehaving!" he says in his Alabama drawl. (So dreamy.) "I always say, a bad brow can ruin a good gal!"

Allie agrees: "Lena Dunham says weak eyebrows are like having a bad handshake, but worse, because they're on your face."

While he's tweezing, Jared talks tricks of the trade: "If you have wide-set eyes, start your brow closer to the bridge of the nose to give the illusion that your eyes are closer together. For close-set eyes, add distance between your brows." Lips loose, Jared lets slip some intel on Benefit's new brow collection, out in July. "All the products look like magic wands," he says, naming names: Browvo! (makes your brows grow), Kabrow! (a tinted cream-gel brow builder), 3D Browtones (for instant color highlights)….

"I'm next!" Joanna says, handing me her champagne glass. Jared tilts her chin up. "You're patchy; you have holes," he says. "If you really want to add oomph to your arches, stick to the 3 Ts when applying Gimme Brow [a mini mascaralike tube]: Tease, Tame, Tail." He extends his hand like a surgeon; Juliette opens her purse and hands him a tube. We're riveted. "Start by back-combing the brow hairs—like teasing your hair. This helps those microfibers to wrap all the way around the hair." Jo's brows double in size. "Next, tame the brow shape in the direction of the hair growth." Jared brushes the brows back into place. "Finally"—he picks up my eyebrow pencil—"add a little extra to the tail." He steps back, admiring his work. "Damn, I'm good!"

"Ooh," Jo says, seeing for herself. "It's like a smoky eye, but it's a smoky eyebrow!"

One by one, all brows get done. It's the kind of hands-on experience that makes everyone feel good, no, pluck that—feel great.

When the last cork flies, we're having a lovefest, our arches and spirits lifted. "Ladies, eyebrows are a sign of youth in every culture," Jared announces. "I always say there are two ways of looking younger: full brows and older friends."