The Great Skinny Brow-essaince

To Bleach Or To Pluck?

The 2010s were a time of glamorously cartoonish arches, sculpted into opaque, boomerang-shaped angles (there were stencils). Glossier Boy Brow, Anastasia Beverly Hills Dipbrow, Benefit Cosmetics Gimme Brow became hero products; “eyebrows on fleek” was the mantra. Now, dead-center of the 2020s, TikTok has given us an abundance of “core” aesthetics to fuel more fluid beauty explorations of gender performance and identities, the results of which have finally trickled down (or up) to our eyebrows.

Celebs like Julia Fox, Alex Consani and Doja Cat have realized that a smear of bleach over our brows conveys an ethereal, otherworldly, slightly alien look—perhaps the antidote to beauty culture’s emphasis on hyper-optimization and feminine performance. In Fox’s case, she embraced the look’s editorial and man-repelling effect. For Doja Cat, bleaching her brows was just a precursor to shaving them off (on Instagram Live, no less), saying she “never liked having hair.” Even celebs known for more conventionally feminine looks, like the Kardashians, Jenners, and Hadids, debuted bleached brows for a moment, suggesting a departure from conventional expressions of beauty. During the early quarantine years of the COVID pandemic, I tried all sorts of makeup looks in the privacy of my home, including faking “bleached” brows with concealer (not for me, I look like a ghost), so I get the appeal of play. Gatekeeping one’s brows with bleach is a sort of rebellious “fuck off” to being perceived.

The Thinification Of Brows

After bleached brows comes the thin-ification of brows. Our obsession with all things “snatched" has led to a TikTok-proliferated trend of shaving off an outer third portion of the brow to straighten the arch, giving visual lift to a face—once the eyebrow razor’s in hand, it’s too easy to keep going. In reality, skinny brows have made their rounds throughout history, from the age of Hollywood silent film starlets in the 1920s and 30s through the large influence from Chicana culture during the 1940s and onwards. Originally, the Chola brow was a symbol of identity and rebellion against the pressures of mainstream beauty standards in the Mexican-American community. Now, it's seen once more on the faces of certain models and It-girls influencing the culture now, like Gabriette, Amelia Grey, and Alexis Demi. “I’m seeing people in their twenties, totally fearless, just going for it,” says Chanel Brow Artist Jimena Garcia. (She credits our abundance of hair growth solutions today as to what’s possibly behind that fearlessness.)

Naturally, when influencers and content creators started shaving their eyebrows into thinner lines, the Internet got a bit of a shiver at what this means for the zeitgeist, bringing to mind the last time skinny brows were popular: the '90s to early 2000s, an era notorious for its ruthless attitude toward body image. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire—and in this case, where there’s massive cultural uptake of GLP-1s, there’s a familiar crisis of faith in the body positivity movement. (Even though our cultural obsession with thinness never truly waned, even when brows were fuller.) Our quickness to grasp onto nostalgia for the recent past when life seemed simpler, yet still modern—before our current global political upheaval, before doom scrolling, before our panopticon of anxiety, and when young people had more economic options—seems to indicate that people yearn for time when beauty (and life) was more streamlined, yet still individually celebrated.

But before we raise the alarm, know this: Skinny eyebrows are not necessarily the size 00 of the face, you know? "The world is changing so fast, and we're becoming so influenced by so many different cultures because we're being exposed to them from social media," says Garcia. And with the expansion and splintering of niche-ness, as only the Internet and social media culture can do, we have this plethora of source material, increasingly plucked out of the contexts that may have stigmatized them in the past.

The Democratization Of Brows

The reality is, “Everybody’s trying everything,” Garcia says. As much as I admire how daring the younger generations are in their beauty experimentations, I’m skeptical as to whether the culture will fully embrace a skinny brow resurgence, or a bleached one, though I do love how both are in many ways a rebellion against our current inescapable beauty culture; messing with your eyebrows is a very deliberate way to opt out and create your own identity. Eyebrows are the defining facial recognition feature on anyone’s face, so changing them, even slightly, can yield dramatic, “who is she?” results. But we’re not done limited to skinny or bleached—for example, eyebrow slits have been trending in high-fashion editorials and on the likes of Zayn Malik, Tyla, Iris Law, and K-pop idols Yuta and Taeyong. (Personally, I’m waiting for eyebrow piercings to come back in full force.) Garcia thinks we’re going to ride the wave of the bleached brow straight into color theory. “The bleaching will go into, ‘Oh, what about blue brows? Or pink brows?'" she says.

As for the rest of us who don’t look like ethereal aliens with bleached brows (and in my case, more like an egg)? “What’s interesting is that underneath the experimentation, there’s a stronger appreciation for natural brow growth than ever before,” Kristie Streicher, brow expert and founder of Striiike, tells me. “There’s this awareness that the natural brow is valuable real estate and people are being more thoughtful about how they treat it. Even when they play with shape, people want to protect their growth.” (So, no need to throw out your "lamination-effect” brow gels anytime soon.)

The future of our brows remains a bit of a wild west, but being in an era of experimentation and regrowth can only help us figure out how much we allow beauty trends to fuel our self-expression. “The idea of a ‘perfect’ brow is fading, and people are starting to embrace the idea that beauty is about enhancing your natural features, rather than erasing or reshaping them to fit a mold,” Streicher says. Like Garcia, she believes we’re heading into a new era of individual expression, where brows are groomed and styled to suit you, not what's trending. Imperfections are always what’s most interesting about people; they define our beauty culture and authentically celebrate individuality. I would, however, leave microblading as a last resort—some experiments are much more permanent than advertised.