“…a psychic and physical danger to men”

July 17, 2022 4:46 AM

Since antiquity, women’s eyebrows have been sites of intense scrutiny, constantly shifting between trend cycles: A brief history of women's eyebrows in art
posted by iamkimiam (12 comments total)

At the beginning of the Qajar dynasty in Persia (1785–1925), male and female ideals of beauty grew closer and closer together, and so did the eyebrows! While unibrows may have been scoffed at in Western Europe, scholar Afsaneh Najmabadi has shown that women would darken their eyebrows and even decorate their upper lips with mascara to show a faint mustache.

Neat! I am here for the androgyny.

I was looking through some old pictures with my sister recently, and it's fascinating to see our eyebrows over the last decade or so. She went through a very plucked eyebrow phase, and the teeny lines look so strange now but I recall thinking she looked very polished at the time.

When I was a young teen and just starting to shave my body hair, I took the razor I used to shave my legs and tried to shape my eyebrows with that. Luckily no one insisted on photographing the results, so I only have memories of the terrible results. I, for one, do not look good without eyebrows.
posted by the primroses were over at 6:54 AM on July 17, 2022 [3 favorites]

this is really fascinating! we rarely think, consciously, of how much information we receive from gestures and facial expressions. eyebrows are such a strong component of this.

my eyebrows are nearly 100% drawn on. I feel validated to know that people, across time and around the world, have been engaging in similar modifications to their appearance as part of their expression in society.
posted by supermedusa at 8:47 AM on July 17, 2022 [2 favorites]

a colleague's side hustle turned to including microblading services

is microblading pretty common now?
posted by elkevelvet at 10:05 AM on July 17, 2022

I've gotten in trouble for saying this before, but...
May the pencil-stencil eyebrows of the 90's never return! Long live the fuzzy caterpillar!
posted by bartleby at 10:46 AM on July 17, 2022 [3 favorites]

I remember writing to the Kucinich for President campaign and telling them their boy didn't stand a chance unless they gave him eyebrows that looked a bit more Presidential than the almost completely missing set his face had grown on its own.

If only they'd listened.
posted by flabdablet at 11:37 AM on July 17, 2022

This is really neat. I'm a guy, but I've been a little fascinated by women's eyebrow practices since I learned about threading, just as an obscure creative art. I never noticed thin eyebrows in the 90s, but a lot of these look great (or fine) with thin brows and some look wildly different! Audrey Hepburn almost looks like Lucille Ball. Jennifer Connelly looks like an entirely different person.
posted by rhizome at 12:06 PM on July 17, 2022

As my hair is going more and more grey, my eyebrows (already blonde) are well nigh invisible so I now have to resort to a variety of brow makeup to show that I have any at all. It's amazing the difference some stuff makes. The first time I used brow mascara it became obvious how much eyebrow I still had and how I'd got used to nothing at all and suddenly...caterpillars!

Nowdays, I have slightly more control over what sort of eyebrows I end up with on any given day which has resulted in the following conversation;

Friend: This is a disaster!
Me: You're being a little dramatic.
Friend: You're not taking this seriously!
Me: Of course I'm taking it seriously. Look, I drew on my serious eyebrows for you today.
posted by ninazer0 at 4:52 PM on July 17, 2022 [8 favorites]

It's interesting to see how people have fiddled with their eyebrows over time and around the world. When I worked in a photograph archive, I usually tried to pinpoint the photograph's date by looking at the hairdos and clothing. I suppose if it were a more diverse archive I also could have taken brow care into consideration.

For myself, my eyebrows did not survive the 90's. I've taken to dyeing them with Just for Men mustache dye to make them visible, and I still color them in a bit with brow pencil. It makes a huge difference in the way my face looks, but it's more work than I would prefer to do. I wish I could go back in time to tell Teen Gray Duck to put the tweezers down!!
posted by Gray Duck at 5:01 PM on July 17, 2022 [2 favorites]

Some women in Central Asia draw on a unibrow and it looks amazing. When I was staying with a family in Tajikistan the matriarch used a black stick of something and drew dye on my eyebrows for me unprompted. I have natural light, thin eyebrows and thought it was interesting that this seemed to just be something done after bathing.
posted by Bunglegirl at 10:10 PM on July 17, 2022 [1 favorite]

For the full effect of Heian era brows (when a round face was preferred and both men and women of the court blackened their teeth for beauty) you can take a look at female noh masks, like this one for example.
posted by sukeban at 12:51 AM on July 18, 2022

Only vaguely related, but I am re-reading Stephenson's Quicksilver, and ran across this line, which I remembered from my first reading (probably when I was in my middle 50's)

... a hearty, grizzled man in his middle fifties, with all that that implied in the way of eyebrows.

posted by MtDewd at 9:50 AM on July 18, 2022 [2 favorites]

> May the pencil-stencil eyebrows of the 90's never return!

What a strange thing we used to do.
posted by cotton dress sock at 9:55 PM on July 18, 2022