Is the Skinny Brow Poised for a Comeback? A Compelling Case for Breaking Out the Tweezers

“My face is an object so visible it’s embarrassing,” says Angela, the actress-protagonist of Clarice Lispector’s A Breath of Life. And there is perhaps no feature that defines the face as powerfully and publicly as one’s eyebrows. ‘Haves’ constantly rein them in, while ‘have-nots’ rely on makeup to create the illusion of abundance; as for my own unruly pair, I’ve recently taken to accepting compliments with the line, “Thanks, I grew them myself.”

Full brows are, of course, at the peak of their powers right now, fueled by Cara Delevingne’s bold arches, newfangled brow pencils and powders, even brow extensions. But I find myself, stuck with fashionably thick brows, drawn to the time when the pendulum swung the other way—to the penciled-in arches of Greta Garbo, who would have been 110 today.

Garbo used her face like a mask to project the subtlest changes of feeling: She wore her eyebrows, not the other way around. The result was powerful enough to provoke literary response: Roland Barthes wrote an entire essay on her “face-object,” where “something sharper than a mask is looming . . . between the curve of the nostrils and the arch of the eyebrows.” One associates thick-browed types like Brooke Shields and now Delevingne with a surly, accidental wildness in contrast to women like Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, and Jean Harlow, all notable for a sexy kind of shrewdness. In erasing their eyebrows, they exposed their facial contours, creating a kind of blank slate.

Garbo, of course, not only embodied subtlety in her acting, but also lived according to the principle. She insisted on closed sets, eschewed the press, and didn’t go to parties or award shows. We remember her refrain “I want to be alone!” from Grand Hotel because it captures her offscreen mystique: Her lasting allure rests on what she didn’t do, what her face didn’t give away. The current cultural moment values the other side of the style spectrum, the constant pressure to “put yourself out there,” whether going bigger on brows or maintaining multiple social media accounts. Garbo, in looks and in life, reminds us of the elegance of restraint—and right now that feels like as good a reason as any to break out the tweezers.

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