The Return of Skinny Brows and the Freedom to Experiment
Graphic by Rose McLarty
Standing in front of my bathroom mirror, brow razor poised carefully between my fingers,I prepared to draft the architecture of my eyebrows.
I was 15 and sick of my eyebrows. They felt like two leeches fastened to my face like invasive species, an overgrowth I refused to recognize. They overwhelmed the rest of my features, blotting out whatever softness I believed might exist underneath.
Whenever I watched my friends plucking their eyebrows, I thought, “How feminine.” I admired their perseverance, the way they continued through the wincing and quiet wails. It looked like a ritual I hadn’t yet learned. I was jealous of their early inclination toward becoming women.
In an attempt to keep up with that womanly instinct of grooming, I took too much from my left eyebrow. Half the tail disappeared, the arch collapsing into bare skin. I could’ve cried, but instead I went to my mother so her anger could pass into me. I didn’t want to cry over my eyebrows. It felt too vain.
With any cohesive shape gone, I booked my first threading appointment. Laid back in the chair, I kicked my feet up and down as my upper body remained rigid. The pain was too piercing to stay completely still. As the threading lady sliced the hair away, you could hear the thumps of my feet against the chair. When I removed my hand from my eye, tears slid down my cheeks.
When my now-longtime eyebrow lady handed me a paper towel to wipe my tears away, she said, “Beauty is pain.”
This is a slogan I had heard for years but never actually connected with. I thought that surely my idea of beauty didn’t have to be painful. It shouldn’t be. But when she handed me the mirror to look at my newly structured brows, the pain became addictive. Every two months — like clockwork — I was back in her chair, cherishing the pain like a gift. That lady and that chair shaped the beginning of my agency to change my body when I pleased.
Now, skinny brows are back. Or at least, brow experimentation is. Unlike the dark, fully arched eyebrows of the ’50s, the bushy brows of the ’80s, and the ultra-sculpted thickness of the 2010s, there is no one way to wear your brows anymore.
As CEO of Anastasia Beverly Hills, Anastasia Soare puts it, “The skinny brow carries a less one-size-fits-all mentality; it doesn’t demand participation.” A tweezer or razor no longer has to be the tool that keeps eyebrows primed and disciplined.
Brow gel can tame hairs and give the illusion of a skinnier brow. Brow lamination, like a perm, keeps brows in place for six to eight weeks. Microblading, a semi-permanent tattoo, mimics individual strands of hair.
Yet even with this new millennium of eyebrow treatments, options largely devoid of struggle and meticulous design, I still opted for the tried-and-true tweezer.
By the end of my sophomore year of college, I had dyed my hair black, pierced my nose, and completely converted my wardrobe to black. However, my brows had hampered what I hoped to be the new me.
One warm day in July, I slathered them in gel, brushed out the hairs extending beyond my brow frame, and tweezed away the bulk. It was painful but rewarding. Four years after shaving off half my brow, I had embraced thinness and the near invisibility of my eyebrow.
One swipe of black gel liner and my eyebrows were done.
Every week since then, I study them closely, plucking stray hairs and shaving the stubborn stubble that insists on growing where my old brows once lived. It’s an obsession, a hobby, a love language. I rarely wear makeup anymore, but I refuse to leave my brows ungelled and ungroomed. They are the one constant. The feature I return to, reshape — and maintain —even when the rest of my face stays bare.
My mother, of course, hated them the moment she saw my face — as she does with nearly any experimentation I try on my face or in my wardrobe. And, naturally, to push her even further and indulge my own whimsy, I got my left eyebrow pierced.
Watching me groom my eyebrows, my best friend once asked whether I’m scared that one day I’ll pluck too much or shave too far into the few hairs I have left.
“No. If I do, then it’s okay. I’ll go with what comes,” I said.
I wasn’t scared of the tweezers anymore or attached to a one-size-fits-all mindset. Brows can feel intimidating because of how much they frame your face, but that’s also what makes experimenting with them so fun. They offer the ability to shift your look, your style, your vibe (sometimes in minutes). Bleached brows, pencil-thin arches, straight brows — whichever you choose — beauty is in the agency. Beauty is found within choice and the freedom to explore through trial and error.
My eyebrows have never just been about hair, but a repeatable way of testing who I am willing to become. Every alteration has mirrored something else I was learning to allow in myself.
At 15, it was an introduction to uncertainty and chaos — the kind you have to make peace with as a teenager. Sitting in the threading chair, wincing at the pull of the thread, was the willingness to endure discomfort in exchange for control. Thinning them into fine lines was clarity and a kind of newfound boldness that my first year of college gave me. Getting a metal rod through them was risk and exhilaration and the realization that I am always, eventually, ready to become someone slightly different again.
My brows have grown with me, each phase reflecting a version of myself I was learning how to inhabit.
Take advantage of free will, because your eyebrows will change with or without you.