After years of manicured arches, eyebrows are making a thicker, fuller, more discreetly groomed return to their natural state.
Eyebrows are like shoes: you don’t notice them unless they are exquisitely right or disastrously wrong. As someone who has spent many years in an intense relationship with her own dark, willful Italian brows, I’ve come to realize that they are not trivial, frivolous or merely incidental. Eyebrows matter. They matter a lot. And this season they matter even more than usual: makeup artists are returning to the strong, pronounced lines of Audrey Hepburn in her early-’60s heyday. Although natural-looking brows have been the thing for a while (see the actresses Jennifer Connelly and Rachel Weisz), in this new incarnation, they are fuller, heavier and more precisely sculptured. Unless a woman has Brooke Shields’s natural assets, and maybe even then, she may find herself filling in with pencil or shadow.
The point of all this fuss, of course, is that thick, full eyebrows signify youth and vitality — eyebrows thin with age — and that some semblance of a midpoint arch can make eyes look more alert and cheekbones more angular and defined. But the importance of eyebrows goes beyond aesthetics. Brows are generally the darkest, highest-contrast element on the face, and, along with the eyes, the most important feature for telegraphing feelings and thoughts. Eyebrows, you might say, are the rhythm track of the face, keeping its expressive beat, providing emphasis and punctuation. Without them, the face is an inscrutable platter. (People who lack eyebrows, or who have very light ones, tend to look extraterrestrial — think Tilda Swinton or the Mona Lisa.)
In a sense, eyebrows serve the face’s highest function — that of communication, even seduction. Eyebrows show interest, engagement and understanding. Raising, furrowing or shifting them ever so slightly registers and reciprocates attention. Why, then, do so many women still insist on paring theirs down to skinny crescents, the sort of barely-there lines popularized by film stars in the 1930s and again by waifish models in the 1990s? When I see such brows, I can’t help but think of poor “Mrs. B,” my junior-high music teacher, whose penciled-in half-moons made her look perpetually, relentlessly cheerful, even as she sang melancholy folk songs like “One Tin Soldier.” These days, such incongruities are all too common. If plastic surgery and excessive injections have taught us anything, it’s that narrowing one’s expressive range is a perilous endeavor.
But great eyebrows are not easy to come by, and it’s not just a matter of leaving them alone. Even “natural” brows require a fair amount of backstage grooming. My advice, as with hair color or therapy, is to see a professional, who can not only work some alchemy with tweezers or wax but can also instruct on the artistic wielding of pencils and brushes — thereby preventing a stenciled Kabuki-like effect that’s striking on the runways but shocking on the street.
Like gently trimmed hedgerows, which are more pleasing to the eye when left slightly wild, rather than manicured so severely they look maimed, eyebrows deserve a restrained but sure hand. Recently, I insisted a young friend tag along with me to an appointment with the Beverly Hills brow expert I have seen for more than a decade. The drive took the better part of the morning. My friend was skeptical: could eyebrows possibly be worth all this trouble, all this traffic? But the results — brows that magically lifted my eyelids and excavated my jawline — made her a believer. Never mind the hedgerows. I’d spruced up the entire yard.
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