When Mitski sings “I’ve been big and small, and big and small, and big and small again,” it’s unlikely she was talking about the trajectory of eyebrow trends from the mid-90s, but it’s certainly a useful analogy. It’s almost impossible to point to a beauty trend which has flip-flopped more dramatically between extremes – from the skinny pencil brow of the 90s and early 2000s, to the 2016 block brow, to the minimalistic “soap brow” which emerged around Covid, and then the alternative penchant for barely-there bleached or plucked eyebrows à la Gabriette or Mia Goth. So why did eyebrows capture our attention so much from the mid-2010s onwards, and what can we learn about society and the internet from eyebrow trends?

“It’s almost impossible to point to a beauty trend which has flip-flopped more dramatically between extremes”

Before around 2013, eyebrows had been negligible in importance. Magazines from the 1990s and 2000s barely discuss eyebrows beyond a vague idea that they should be plucked and well-groomed. These publications offered almost excessive detail about which eyeshadow shades would suit your eye colour best or which lipstick would match your complexion, but when it came to eyebrows the attitude was not additive (i.e. put makeup on) but negative (pluck, tweeze, take things off).

Contrast this indifference towards eyebrows with the attitudes of the social media age – the Instagram explore page was suddenly full of close-ups of eyebrows and if your makeup routine didn’t consist of two generous scoops of Anastasia Beverly Hills brow pomade you couldn’t make it in the beauty world. The phrase “on fleek,” nominated as the OED Word of the Year in 2015 and immediately familiar to anyone born before 2010 with a social media connection, was an integral part of the lexicon, and instinctually conjures up images of a perfectly thickened, filled and arched Kylie Jenner set of eyebrows. My theory is that the format of the Instagram explore page and the advent of the front-facing iPhone camera helped fuel the obsession with eyebrows: a close-up of a single eyebrow fits neatly into the perfect square of a 2010s Instagram post and the front-facing camera allowed you to zoom into your own eyebrows and see them in detail, as opposed to awkwardly holding up a pocket mirror millimetres from your face which would have been the case pre-smartphone.

Also central to the story of eyebrows in the 2010s is Snapchat. The half-face selfies we used for streaks made the eyes and eyebrows front and centre, explaining why girls of this era chose to focus on these areas of the face and opt for the block brow and eyeshadow cut-crease combo. The obsession around eyebrows gave them an almost mystical quality – NikkieTutorials and James Charles’ oft-repeated refrain that they were going to “do their brows off-camera” created a powerful aura and mystique around them, as though they were something magical and incomprehensible distinct from the rest of the face which could be included in a makeup tutorial just fine.

This era also saw the rise of makeup-related clickbait, which, when it wasn’t about using an egg or a shoe as a beauty blender, was often about strange ways to do your eyebrows. The wavy eyebrow trend, which nobody seemed to seriously be doing, was a mainstay of the 2016 Instagram explore page and spurred a frenzy of outrage about the stupidity of modern beauty trends. An examination of the 2010s block brow trend is really an anthropology of the social media age. The rise of Instagram and Snapchat facilitated the instant and ubiquitous adoption of this new way of doing brows and a whole set of slang, memes and associations that followed. Above all, smartphones, the internet and the selfie camera ushered in a whole new way of looking at the face.

“An examination of the 2010s block brow trend is really an anthropology of the social media age”

The popularity of the 2016 Instagram brow waned towards the end of the 2010s and the early 2020s saw the advent of the natural Hailey Bieber “soap brow.” The fastidiously filled-in and arched brow was replaced by a fluffy, natural sweeping up of the brows with minimal shaping. Beauty influencers traded Anastasia Beverly Hills Brow Pomade for the Glossier Boy Brow, the product’s very name suggesting an effortless tomboyishness which contrasts the obvious artifice of the 2016 brow. But this isn’t the only eyebrow trend post-Covid: we’ve seen a renewed interest in the 90s pencil-thin brow on celebrities like Bella Hadid and influencers like Gabriette, and a vogue for the bleach brow à la Mia Goth or Julia Fox.

This reveals a bigger truth about the internet – trends have splintered off and become decentralised. The 2010s block brow was ubiquitous – it could be seen on mainstream Instagram models with lip filler and BBLs or on alternative Tumblr girls with purple hair and septum piercings. But after Covid, mainstream beauty influencers no longer have a controlled monopoly on makeup trends. Soap brows conjure up a whole different set of associations to bleached brows – the former being Hailey Bieber, the “clean girl” aesthetic, minimalism, claw clips, freckles, the latter being slightly a more alternative aesthetic leaning, horror films, FKA Twigs, Charli XCX. The word “micro-trend” has become something of a buzzword lately, but it seems to ring true here. Instead of one dominant era-defining look, internet-driven free-for-all, where beauty trends fragment, collide, and vanish at lightning speed.

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