Just as Albert Camus once had his invincible summer, I am having my skinny eyebrow spring. That is a joke. In all seriousness, you may have begun to notice the subtle return of the skinny eyebrow — on Bella Hadid’s Instagram, on that alternative girl in your class or maybe you have even been considering plucking more liberally yourself. Are thin eyebrows back? Should I pull my skinny jeans out of storage? Are claw clips cheugy again?
Trends in women’s beauty and fashion have existed pretty much forever, but in the social media age, these trend cycles have only accelerated. There are plenty of theories as to how trends spread, but the general idea is that one girl who goes to the skate park starts wearing a new pair of sneakers and then her friend copies her. Then all of their friends wear this sneaker. Then all of the teens at the skate park wear this sneaker. Now this is the skater kid sneaker. Now all of these kids are walking around in this sneaker and now other non-skater people think it’s cool and buy their own pair. Now it’s a trend. Today, we live in an age where that skater girl could post her sneakers on her Instagram and hundreds of followers would see them in an instant. Even better, she could post it on TikTok and thousands of people who don’t follow her can see them! Maybe she’s even selling them! Maybe it’s an ad that she’s getting paid for. When this is an actual business model, and when social media platforms like TikTok encourage low attention span and rapid content consumption, the rapid social media trend cycle is born.
I’m sure you’ve seen the trend cycles play out before. There were the people who were early adopters of baggy jeans around 2017, and there were the stragglers who didn’t hang up their skinny ones until 2020. But now that these cycles are moving faster and faster, how can you even know what’s in trend? By the time the late-adopters are ready to switch out their jeans, is their own pair in trend again? It’s impossible! But it’s also freeing.
Perhaps you’ve seen the trend cycles play out on your own face. I certainly have. I first became aware of my face, truly aware, when I was about 12, and eyebrows were a very big part of that awareness. I don’t think I am making a ridiculous generalization when I say that most 12-year-old girls hate how they look, to varying degrees. This is too big, that is too small and all of it is wrong. Eye liner and contour have limited modification capabilities. What can you do? Your eyebrows.
I was 12 years old in 2016, which was the age of the thick, prominent, arched brow. I recall the older women I knew lamenting their intense 1990s plucks, leaving them with forever thin brows. I knew exactly what was wrong with mine. They were thick enough, but really light, and they didn’t arch, they just blobbed. I could never be Cara Delevingne! When my mother came home one day from the mall with a little bottle of eyebrow gel for me, meant as an innocent gift, she may as well have handed me Pandora’s box. So began years of strategic plucking, precise overfilling and freakouts if I woke up without enough time to draw them on.
About two years later, to my horror, I had to take swimming for my freshman gym class. How could anyone see me without my eyebrows! I dreaded it for weeks when finally the time came to go to school bare-faced. As you may imagine, no one cared. From then on, my eyebrow obsession lost some of its power.
Eyebrows are such a prominent locus for women’s beauty trends because they are so easily mutable. In a world filled with ads telling you that everything is wrong with you and you can buy this product to fix it, eyebrows are where you can actually enact some meaningful change. If you had naturally thick eyebrows in the era of ’90s thin or if you had naturally thin ones in the 2010s era of thick, tough luck. I would be remiss to not mention the racial aspect of it. It is not coincidental that skinny eyebrows once dominated as many women of color have thicker eyebrows, or that thick eyebrows became desirable when influencer giants like Kylie Jenner updated their looks to imitate those same women.
When the trend cycle moves so fast, everything and nothing is in. 2016 brows aren’t quite as ubiquitous as they once were, but skinny brows are not necessarily in trend either. For me, with my naturally blobby eyebrows, I have given up on trying to draw an arch where none exists and I’m keeping them thin. Hence, my skinny eyebrow spring. The point is not that you should do the same, but that in this era that is less bound to the trends, you should do whatever you want — skinny brows, thick brows, bleached, shaved or squiggly. You’re free!
My favorite moment in Greta Gerwig’s Barbie (2023) is at the end when Barbie closes her eyes and becomes a real woman. The most trademark Gerwigian moment of the movie, a montage of real women doing real women things rolls — women laughing with their friends, making faces at the camera and so on. For every impressionable girl who grows into a real woman, there will come a time when you have to stop trying to be the Barbie and just start being yourself.
Chloe Asack is a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences. She can be reached at casack@cornellsun.com.
