Brow Beating

The only woman I ever knew who was truly serious about plucking her eyebrows—or at least would admit it—was a long-ago girlfriend of my dad’s. This was the 1970s. She plucked and pulled with persistence, until there wasn’t much hair left. Then she’d take an eyebrow pencil, heat it with a match, and sketch on the tiny curves she was entitled to. Eventually, her eyebrow roots quit spitting out new hairs and now she’s stuck drawing them on herself every day. When she feels lazy, she goes without. God help her in senility.

Dad’s girlfriend was aiming for a classical seventies kind of sexy, and back then, the options for achieving this look were limited. The average person didn’t have access to plastic surgery. Secretaries didn’t get lip implants. You had hair dye, lipstick, tweezers, and whatever God gave you. Oh, and Jane Fonda and Faye Dunaway.

Generally speaking, unless you’re Groucho Marx, eyebrows are not supposed to attract a lot of attention. They exist, in a practical sense, to keep sweat from rolling into our eyes, but how many of us perspire from our skulls with enough regularity to make them worthwhile for that purpose? Of course, eyebrows are also essential when it comes to expressing ourselves. They get knitted together in frustration, they draw down in anger, leap skyward in surprise, quiver with sadness, and arch (just one, on an especially cool eyebrow owner) when regarding something ironic or suspicious. Watching somebody’s eyebrows as they tell a good story is like witnessing a tiny gymnastics routine. If eyes are the windows to one’s soul, then eyebrows are the window treatments: the billowing sheers, the velvet drapes, the puckered valances, or, in some cases, the bamboo shades from Pier 1.

Since eyebrows are so adept at sending messages, we have become obsessed with the idea of controlling the message. If these furry punctuators insist on jumping around on our foreheads, we want them to look elegant while doing so. It’s part of our impulse to tame nature, to say, I am not an ape—I manage my facial hair! And once you start looking, it’s impossible not to notice that everyone seems to be plucking. (As a non-plucker, I find it frustrating to hear perfectly decent natural brows described as “thick,” “unwieldy,” or “unsightly.”) A spa just opened in Minneapolis, for example, that claims to be the first in the area primarily devoted to creating the “perfect brow shape.”

Whether tended to by an expert in a salon or simply abused before the bathroom mirror, eyebrows are carved and curved, fashioned into forms that we believe to be emblematic of our characters (or at least what we would have others believe our characters to be). There are types: the vixen with her arch and downward taper; the girl next door, brows as plain and round as jump ropes; the gamine with her thick, straight dashes; and the goofball, whose eyebrows often resemble the loopy side of a Velcro strip (backcombing may be involved). To spot a natural eyebrow, it seems you have to go all the way back to the suffragettes. Even then, don’t be too sure.

Women have done a lot of messing with their brows over the centuries. Greeks cultivated the unibrow. The Chinese of old valued small eyes, so eyebrows were plucked to nubs. In the Middle Ages, European women harvested all the hairs from their brows and, with the addition of powder, succeeded in making their faces resemble perfect eggs. Later, when Queen Elizabeth I decided that England would be her eternal suitor, she removed her brows altogether in order to eliminate this vestige of womanhood, of humanness. At the opposite extreme were women who glued on heavy, mouse-fur eyebrow toupees. As Jonathan Swift joked in “A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed,” written in 1731: “Her eye-brows from a mouse’s hide/Stuck on with art on either side/Pulls off with care, and first displays ’em/Then in a play-book smoothly lays ’em.” Late Victorian women went dramatic, darkening their brows with coal and other substances, including many that were toxic, forsaking a look of cool detachment for one of sadness and mystery.

With the twentieth century came a slew of new forces shaping the female brow, among them over-the-counter cosmetics, do-it-yourself fashion magazines, and, most influentially, the movies. With cameras zooming in for extended close-ups displayed on twenty-foot screens, actors’ eyes, and their eyebrows, became extremely prominent. This was especially apparent in silent films, where eyebrows delivered entire paragraphs of dialogue, but also in talking films. And of course, women were sitting there in the theater seats, enraptured but also observant, ready to pick up the tweezers and get to work.

Thin, thick, thin, thick. Each decade brought a new trend. In the twenties, Clara Bow looked more tortured than sexy with her weird razor-line brows. As the first true film vamp (short for vampire, meaning a woman who sucks blood from hapless men), Theda Bara wore her brows heavy and curved downward. They made her look dangerous, untrustworthy. She stood in contrast to the good girls of the day; the Mary Pickfords with their peppy, upturned swooshes like Scandinavian lilts at the ends of sentences. And then there were the ice queens. Greta Garbo plucked her brows into arches so perfect they revealed nothing, giving birth to what is known as the imperious brow. There was Joan Crawford’s bossy brow, Audrey Hepburn’s girl-lost-in-the-woods brow, and Candice Bergen’s smart brow—slightly arched, but tapering off before diving downward into vixen territory. On screen, eyebrows created stereotypes and nurtured them. They sent signals about how to interpret characters, like black hats and white hats in westerns.

If one were to give a lifetime achievement award to a particularly enduring brow, it would have to be the diva arch. It even {Fashion, p. 89}
{Fashion, from p. 87} survived the shaggy nineteen-sixties as the ultimate statement of feminine perfection. Lauren Bacall has it. So does Sharon Stone. And also Teri Hatcher, whom I mention only because she is the poster girl for the power of plucking. Compare her Nancy Drew look on TV’s Lois & Clark to her femme fetal persona in James Bond’s Tomorrow Never Dies (and now on Desperate Housewives). I’m telling you, it’s all in the brows.

As I write this, we’re in the thick of Oscar season, and I find myself interpreting all the hooey as one big battle of the brow. Who will have won out in the supporting actress category, for example: the softened, playful curves of Kate Winslet’s diva brows, as worn in Finding Neverland, or Cate Blanchett’s eyebrows channeling Katharine Hepburn in The Aviator? If you think I’m overstating the importance of the eyebrow, consider the transformation Charlize Theron went through to portray Aileen Wuornos in Monster, which won her an Oscar. According to makeup artist Toni G (who apparently has no last name), “Charlize’s eyebrows needed to be completely changed to frame her face differently, so I took off all the outside part of her eyebrows, and also bleached them. Eyebrows are an amazing representation of what people go through in their lives. You can see an angry person, a happy person, a gentle person, all through the eyebrows. Aileen’s eyebrows had a tendency to angle upward towards her forehead, which created an angry expression.”

Mad, sad, perplexed, surprised, happy—eyebrows tell all. They’re more important than ever with the increasing use of Botox, since they convey those emotions even when the rest of someone’s face doesn’t. They are a bit of a trick, really. (By the way, it’s not only women engaging in this subtle manipulation: Regular guys can model their brows after those of Tom Cruise, Sean Connery, and Denzel Washington, using special kits that include stencils, tweezers, and powder.)

The funny thing is that eyebrows are nearly unnoticeable, and they are supposed to be—except when it comes to the brow notables. Tha
t’s a group that seems to include a significant number of geniuses, people like Marie Curie, Frida Kahlo, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Eleanor Roosevelt, Albert Einstein, and Martin Scorsese (The Aviator notwithstanding). These people cultivate, through distraction, absolute forests of meaning from the hairs hovering above their eyes. They say, I’m too concerned with important matters to pluck. Perhaps I give a twirl with thumb and forefinger, but only when contemplating a formula. One has to wonder, if Einstein were busy in the bathroom trying to tame his wiry brows, would he have conjured the theory of relativity? Or would he instead have invented the curling iron?