The Great Beauty Divide: Thin Vs Full Brows

Are skinny brows back? Apparently so. We ask beauty experts for their take and not everyone is on board.

Not going to lie. When I heard that skinny brows were back in style, I raised my full, HD microbladed brows in terror, and wondered how they would fit in.

I had witnessed the peak of the trend during the Nineties and Noughties. And let’s just say it took rounds of grooming sessions at eyebrow specialist Browhaus – and years of patience – to have my brows look the way they do now.

But just as I thought I had put skinny brows to bed, they have now wriggled their way back into my life.

Today, we are seeing the look on Gen Z celebrities like rapper Doja Cat, actor Nicola Peltz Beckham, and models Bella Hadid and Kendall Jenner, as we did in the past with ’90s icons Kate Moss, Naomi Campbell and Gwen Stefani.

“But Bella, Nicola and Kendall… they’re models!” makeup artist Larry Yeo replies wryly over text, with a hint of sarcasm. His gripe is that as professional models, their brows are the property of fashion trends – yet with the magic of stylists and makeup artists, their brows would look fuller in time for the next beauty trend.

“Not for regular women,” he adds with roll-eye emoji.

HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF

So when did skinny brows make their debut? Makeup artist Cheryl Ow posits that it might have started during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I in the 16th century. The British monarch had pencil-thin brows to match her white foundation, with arches that were plucked and made to look thin and sharp, accentuating and creating the illusion of a high forehead. This was said to make women appear more “intelligent”, a look favoured among the upper class.