Yes, the history of the eyebrow is a thing.
I can no longer watch my Snapchat memories; the inner cringe is crippling. My eyes are immediately drawn to my eyebrows. What are those dark brown bricks floating above my eyelashes? Mom, why did you let me go to school like that?
The evolution of the eyebrow in the past 10 years has been a merciful one. The skinny eyebrow is out and the bushy eyebrow is in. The eyebrow conscious have ceased plucking their eyebrows past regrowth and are embracing the fuller brow. Eyebrows are key features of our faces, but the owner of Anastasia Beverly Hills (ABH), Anastasia Soare, believed they have been ignored in makeup routines for too long. As the eyebrow expert, Soare popularized thick eyebrows on her celebrity clients by incorporating the artistic theory of The Golden Ratio into her three-step process of shaping. Who knew eyebrow hairs could be so artistic?
But before we can arrive at the compromise of the fluffy soap brow era, ushered in by makeup companies like Glossier, we had ABH’s Dip Brow. Thanks to Anastasia Beverly Hills, we had the tools to construct arches sturdy enough to hold up buildings. We were not skilled enough to replicate Anastasia’s brow-craft. Dip Brow became our own sharpie markers, producing some severe eyebrow looks. Anastasia Soare even addressed this herself via TikTok:
The evolution of the eyebrow has hardly followed a straight line — the fashion has morphed from flat to curved to thin to blade thin to bushy and then thin again. Despite what children of the 90s may believe, the 1920s and 1930s saw thinner eyebrows than the pencil-thin brows Y2K celebrities Drew Barrymore and Gwen Stafani sported. Similar to today’s trends, the 1960s and 1980s saw a revert back to fuller, bushy eyebrows. The eyebrow game has always ebbed and flowed.
The 2010s witnessed the birth of the Instagram brow. Just as Audrey Hepburn did in the 1960s and Brooke Shields did in the 1980s, Kim Kardashian brought the thick, carved-out brow back into popular culture. This era of brow brought science and geometrics into eyebrow styling. Microblading, brow lamentation and brow mapping are brow shaping techniques that combine math with beauty.
Since the craze of Dip Brow has subsided, the current trend favors a more natural, but still fuller brow. Brow gels and brow waxes replaced Dip Brow. Masks have also added heightened emphasis on the obsession over eyebrows, as it has become the most recognizable feature of a person. But don’t worry; history has shown these eyebrow trends never stick around for very long. If you are a brick eyebrow person or favor the pencil stroke thin line to frame your eyes, your time to shine will come along soon enough. Although personally, I pray every night thin eyebrows (and low rise jeans) never return.