I’ve always loved raising eyebrows.
In surprise, or shock, or outrage. Or in hysterics. I always thought eyebrows were how our faces spoke to the world. They just sit there, above your eyes, enjoying the vastness of your forehead, speaking the unspoken to the world. Eyebrows are eyebrows.
Except now, there’s eyebrow trends.
That’s right. Your eyebrows are probably wrong. Off trend. Your eyebrows are probably old-fashioned. And eyebrows have had fashions. Big Hollywood arched brows of the 1950’s and ’50s glam stars. The Brooke Shields heavy brow of the ’80s. The overplucked grunge brow of the ’90s.
It’s always been a beauty trend in how we wear them, but now it’s on steroids.
The 2024 trend according to Google was ‘soft feathering’. Fully fluffy brows. It’s not just full – it’s the fluffy bit that’s hard to achieve. And the point of trends is that they are impossible and cost money to attain. The full fluffy is only achieved with prioritising brow care. Who TF looks after their brows? And what in God’s name is brow care?
I wash my face, I brush my teeth, but FFS I’m not doing brow care! People are in a cost-of-living crisis and others are locked in the bathroom applying expensive gunk to their eyebrows.
I thought brow care was removing the mono. No. That’s not enough. According to the people who spend their lives coming up with new ways to make women feel shit about themselves, you have to brush your brows. Then apply an eyebrow gel. You should trim them. Shape them. Laminate them.
Yep laminate. It’s an eyebrow perm. It gives you shiny, sticky, uppy eyebrows. But you have to moisturise them so they don’t dry out. And there’s risks. They can go curly and they can fall out. So you can be left with no eyebrows at all. Which is okay, because if you wait long enough they’ll be on trend.
But don’t panic because we can tattoo on some brows, or you can use stick-ons. Microblading is the most common – a kind of semipermanent tattooing done with a sharp tool. Ouch. You have to make sure you don’t get infected. This is great for those of us who over plucked in the ‘90s to get the Pamela Anderson one-hair-conga-line eyebrow, or if you have alopecia.
But eyebrows don’t stay still. Just when you get the perfect brow they bring in a new trend which is eyebrow bleaching. So you look a bit like an alien. If you’ve had an eyebrow perm or tattooing you’re off trend. Which is a pretty sneaky thing to do. The one thing you know about fashion trends, is that in order for someone to be ‘on trend’ the rest of us have to be ‘off’.
I don’t think about my eyebrows. I don’t think men ever think about their eyebrows. They’re there. They’re fine. I have heaps of other stuff to worry about.
And as a woman who is now 57 I can tell you that my eyebrows have had zero impact on my life. They have neither made it better nor worse. People have not loved me for my brows nor rejected me because they’re ugly. I have not envied the brows of others. And I don’t think anyone has envied mine. I was not successful because of my brows and they never caused me to fail.
They’re just eyebrows.
Behind them though, in that wonderful cavity of our skull is this thing called a brain. And when it comes to putting in some time obsessing and feeding and nourishing – brain care actually is life changing.
And you don’t need a perm, or a razor, or a tattoo. Just a book.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
