How One Artist Is Taking Statement Brows to Eye-Opening New Heights

Millie Brown first caught the world’s attention with her subversive vomit paintings; swirling color-splattered works that take the notion of gut instinct to thought-provoking places—quite literally. Watch one of her many eye-opening YouTube clips, including a particularly controversial performance with Lady Gaga, and it’s clear that the 28-year-old British artist—angel-faced, bow-lipped, and with a breathtaking statement brow—is pushing the boundaries of beauty, too. “My body is the canvas for my art, so makeup has really been important” she says. “I want to tell a story with my face.”

In the ten years since she started her career, those delicate, fine-boned features have played host to some awe-inspiring creative tales. She moved in with underground south London art collective !WOWOW! at age seventeen, quickly immersing herself in the city’s vibrant nightlife scene and dancing until dawn at spots like the legendary Soho destination, Taboo. “We were friends with all the drag queens and they would make me up like a doll with these insane looks, and making an entrance was performance art in and of itself,” she says. “Somehow the focal point was always on the eyes.” Think wild and intentionally outrageous brows made from neon-colored felt and metal spikes that were set with hairspray or glued on.

That playful approach to beauty stuck over the years; for Wilting Point, a week-long performance piece, makeup artist Romero Jennings created wisp-like eyebrows out of paper that decomposed along with the flowerbed that Brown lay in; for Blinded by the Light, a new project Brown is working on for the Marina Abramovic Institute this fall, she plans to encase herself in a life-size egg timer, and have 18K gold leaf brows made to glimmer as the sand runs down her face.

“There’s so much power that we hold in our faces,” she says. “When I put on my brows, it’s like I’m drawing on wings.” Brown moved to Los Angeles a year and a half ago, and despite the new laid-back SoCal lifestyle, won’t leave the house without what she calls her “power brows,” not even on her daily runs in the canyons; “because without them I am naked.” That said, re-creating the signature look each morning doesn’t take her much longer than ten minutes: She uses a MAC brown pencil eyeliner as a base, and a liquid liner to create the feathery brushstrokes on top. In many ways, her instincts aren’t dissimilar to the strong female artists who came before her; where would the world be without Frida Kahlo’s striking mono-brow, for example? And while Brown’s makeup might not provoke the same visceral reactions as her paintings, the way she chooses to frame her face elicits some pretty interesting responses in the aisles of her local supermarket. “Little children are fascinated,” she says smiling. And what about guys? “Well let’s just say I can I tell if a man is interested in me depending on if—and how much—he enjoys my brows.” We’d say they make for a pretty impressive portrait, in any case.

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