Of all the important pieces of advice a mother can pass down to her daughter, there is one nugget of wisdom that is surely the most crucial of all: never mess with your eyebrows. Like, ever. Because there’s a strong chance that they will never grow back.
The (ridiculous) fact is, eyebrow trends come and go but brows themselves don’t always cooperate. While it’s annoyingly easy to grow back leg hair, armpit hair and even the hair on your head, brows have a stubborn habit of refusing to return. It’s like they’re saying “oh NOW you want me here to frame your face and flatter your forehead, do you? Too late honey, you washed me down the sink with your frosted lipstick and hair glitter and I’m not coming back.”
In the 1990s and early ‘00s, tiny, thin, permanently surprised brows were all the rage, and you would get teased in high school if yours were too bushy, so leaving the house without a set of tweezers was unthinkable. Just check out stars like Selena Gomez, Mila Kunis and Jennifer Aniston who all showcased the “tiny eyebrow” trend across red carpets, magazine covers and their official headshots during the era.
A few years later, we all came to our senses — or maybe our foreheads just got cold — and thicker brows came back, thanks to beautifully bushy stars like Cara Delevingne and Jennifer Connelly making them their signature look. The trouble is, because so many of us had already plucked our brows to smithereens, extreme tactics needed to be deployed to get them looking as luxuriously thick as fashion demanded.
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And that’s why the Sharpied-on look became a 2010s trend that was very easy to accidentally take to extremes, with brow lamination, microblading, bleaching and brow tattooing all going mainstream. This is what has led to TikTok users currently sharing their eyebrow regrets under the “eyebrow blindness” hashtag.
And it’s so true — what somehow appeared totally normal and cool at the time rapidly ends up looking bizarre just a few years later. There’s a reason why thick bangs often come back into style when brow trends are on the way out; it’s the easiest way to cover up the damage while you frantically search for a more permanent solution.
It’s something many women now in their late thirties and forties know all too well (“the ’90s stole my eyebrows” is another popular hashtag!) but, while stars like Drew Barrymore might have Hollywood eyebrow pros on speed-dial and enough cash to try every magic lotion and potion going, it’s not always so easy for the rest of us.
Pay attention to Olivia Wilde, previously a major over-plucker, who said “I do not tweeze my eyebrows. I’ve been letting them grow out for years. I try to fill them in whenever nature has abandoned me.”
Meanwhile, Demi Lovato helpfully let slip that she used Latisse, a prescription serum meant for eyelashes, to transform her over-plucked look, while some women swear by good old-fashioned castor oil to stimulate regrowth. The problem? These solutions don’t work for everyone. So we repeat: don’t mess with your eyebrows! Because, in the wise but chilling words of actress Saoirse Ronan: “If you don’t have eyebrows, you don’t really have a face.”
