It seems as if every day we tap our phones awake, we are greeted with yet another buzzy, and extremely fleeting, beauty trend. Dirty martini nails! Nina Park lips! The bubble blowout! It’s no secret that the beauty trend cycle is microscopic, but the one facet of our faces that is (only slightly) less susceptible to this ever-changing sequence is our brows.
According to our calculations, eyebrow trends seem to be the least frequent to come and go—though when they do, they make a cultural statement. Think of the nineties and early aughts skinny brow—a style advised against by everyone who irreversibly overplucked in hopes of replicating Kate Moss and Pamela Anderson’s slim arches—which is slowly making its Saturn return. (Perhaps a direct correlation to the low-rise cuts and gaunt frames that reigned then and now, but that’s a separate conversation.)
More than twenty years later, the COVID-19 shutdown inspired us to embrace bushy, natural brows as the hygiene-powered “clean girl” movement set in. (We all got brow laminations, right?) Now years into a post-pandemic world, experts are watching the style set shake off the minimalist approach to beauty that flourished during quarantine.
“I think we’re seeing a shift in beauty, where we’re getting into more brutalist, unconventional makeup and trends,” celebrity makeup artist Dee Carrion previously told Who What Wear. Case in point, the new-age eyebrow trend that defied subculture odds and turned the It-girls into alt-girls: bleached brows.
What are Bleached Brows?
The name leaves nothing to the imagination—bleached brows are, well, the byproduct of bleaching your brows from your natural hue into a white-blonde. If you already have pale brows, you’re halfway there!
Though people have bleaching their brows as an expression of personal style for years, there’s been a noticeable uptick in the popularity of this trend on the red carpet and tastemakers’ Instagrams—putting “messy-girl makeup” firmly on the map. “I think we’re seeing bleached brows move more into the mainstream because they’re such an easy way to add edge and open up more versatility with makeup,” celebrity makeup artist Kasey Spickard tells Who What Wear. “It’s a simple way to switch up your look without doing a ton of heavy lifting.”
From the white-blonde brows that have become Wednesday star Jenna Ortega’s signature to the temporary style Zendaya donned at the 2024 Met Gala, the stars are making a case for the blonde brow. Spickard, who’s faux-bleached both Summer House star Ciara Miller and Bachelorette alum Tayshia Adams’ brows, says this look is for the bold. “It definitely sparked both positive and negative reactions, which is usually how you know a look is doing something interesting,” he explains.
