Eyebrow Archery

If you don’t think eyebrows warrant a high-priority slot in your beauty routine, take a detour through your local toy aisle. Now I don’t consider Barbie ™ and her many imitators to be personal icons of style, and I discourage anyone from pinning her beauty ideals on an 11-inch plastic doll. But I recently discovered that there’s something to be learned from examining her arches. Barbies’ eyes are equally twinkly, lips rosy with a glint of plastic gloss, and the strip of white where their teeth should be is always blindingly white. The brows, on the other hand, aren’t so standardized.

The thickness and taper of the brow, the angle of the arch and the color of the hair nearly always determine the attitude of doll. A sophisticated, sassy, sexy, even slightly sinister doll gets a brow with a higher, more pronounced arch that looks closer to a wide, inverted V. A younger, wholesome, almost babyish face gets a softer, gently sloping eyebrow that’s paler in color. It should also be noted that not one of them has a brow so thin that it looks like it’s been shaved and drawn on, or so overzealously plucked so that a dozen sparse strands are hanging on for dear life. Take it from Barbie: tweezers are a tool to be used, not abused. Pluck away the bulk of your brow and erase one of your most expressive features. All it takes to change her world is a sharper, or softer, stroke of the paintbrush.

While it’s harder to scrutinize real-life human brows (it tends to make strangers nervous), the rules of shaping are nearly as simple. A meticulously groomed and cosmetically darkened brow with a higher arch is usually attached to a higher-maintenance sort, someone who knows what she wants and how to get it. A natural, free-wheeling brow belongs to someone who’s got a less effortful approach, who has less stringent, lower maintenance standards (or someone who wants to appear to be low maintenance). There are a slew of brow shapes in between those extremes, and they’re often dictated by genetics as much as personal preference. I have a dark-haired Armenian friend who watches her brows, which are strong, impossibly sexy and flawlessly arched, like a hawk ready to swoop down at the sight of a helpless stray hair. If she went for the natural look, the result might be less Andie MacDowell and more Andy Rooney. I have an equally stunning WASPY-looking friend whose high, razor-sharp cheekbones, narrow almond eyes, and angular glasses require a nearly untouched natural brow to soften those edges. In my opinion, they’re both low-key and high maintenance in different ways.