And that includes, yes, the return of pencil-thin brows.
Some wear them bushy. Others have tried bleaching. Many choose to shave them off entirely. The writing is on the wall (and faces everywhere): Brows today cannot be contained. The latest indication? Skinny eyebrows are back.
Like Juicy Couture tracksuits and spiky updos, spindly brows are steeped in ’90s and early 2000s nostalgia. Just three years ago, they were deemed one of the “worst” beauty styles ever, thought to be unnatural and just plain weird. But today, they’re fronting fashion campaigns and influencing TikTok trends, along with other subversive beauty choices.
Primed by the avant-garde makeup in Euphoria and the styling trends on recent runways, arches are in their “anything goes” era. Iris Law has gone viral for her symmetrical slashes. Ariana Grande has traded her filled-in face-framers for blonde strands, while Bella Hadid has accentuated hers with thin streaks of paint. Doja Cat’s shape-shifting arches — from darts of ink to angular squiggles — warrant their own dissertation (which you can read here). But perhaps the greatest emblem of eyebrow rebellion is internet It girl and model Gabbriette Bechtel, whose oft-recreated pencil-thin lines have garnered viral adoration.
When popularized in the 1920s, thin brows first represented sophistication. But after grown-in styles dominated the 1980s, the following decade brought a completely new meaning to ultra-thin arches. Through the 1990s, the beauty look was a mainstay within underground queer communities as a way of rejecting the status quo. And with pop culture icons like Kate Moss and Pamela Anderson championing slight brows on red carpets, a tweezer-happy beauty standard was set. Then, it dramatically fell out of…
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