Who pulls off ultra-thin brows?: Eyebrows for the style essences

Controversial take: skinny eyebrows may not be the world’s greatest evil.

Thick brows are often glorified, while “scary” skinny brows inspire apparent horror. But from a style essences perspective, thick brows are beautiful on certain faces, and thin brows are beautiful on certain faces. Thick brows—shockingly—aren’t inherently superior.

Should you change your eyebrows?

The premise of style essence theory is that your natural looks are beautiful, and that rather than changing the literal look of your features, you can best enhance your beauty by changing the context: change your hairstyle, makeup, and clothes.

So does it even make sense to change your natural brows? It depends on your face.

Your natural brows are probably pretty good

Your natural brows are likely—not definitely, but likely—to some degree harmonious on you.

This is because eyebrows generally follow the shape of your brow bone. Your brow bone harmonizes with your face, because it’s part of your own bone structure. So, the general placement and shape of most people’s brows should be pretty harmonious with their face.

Your natural brows may not be your best brows

But based on observation, people’s natural eyebrows aren’t necessarily their optimally harmonious eyebrows.

This is because hair doesn’t always conform precisely to the shapes and vibes of our faces. Like if you let the hair on your head grow without any intervention, it might not naturally assume a shape that’s flattering on you. Maybe it’ll grow really long and so not fit with your face if your style type consists primarily of short Gamine lines.

Similarly, if you do zero grooming of your brows, there’s no guarantee that their particular length, thickness, etc., will optimally harmonize with the shapes and vibes of your face.

Changing your brows can enhance harmony

Maybe you have the Dramatic and Romantic essences, and your face as a whole is mostly rounded and Romantic, but your brows are mostly straight and Dramatic. In this scenario, it’s possible that you’ll prefer what you look like if you make your brows somewhat more Romantic, so that they better match your face as a whole.

Alternately, you may love your Dramatic brows with your mostly Romantic features and not want to change them at all. Again, your best brows are going to be extremely specific to your particular face.

Matching your brows to a feature you dislike may also help you appreciate that feature more. If you dislike your rounded nose, for example, and you have very angular brows, you could experiment with making your brows more rounded to match your nose.

But there’s nothing wrong with having a round nose paired with angular brows—experimentation is key to find your favorite brows for you.

Eyebrows for the style essences

If you want to experiment with a new brow style, here’s examples of eyebrow shapes for the different style essences.

Dramatic Ethereal eyebrows—Cara Delevingne

Cara’s brows have garnered widespread admiration. Lots of articles are titled things like “Cara Delevingne has the best eyebrows” and “this new religion consists entirely of worshipping Cara Delevingne’s eyebrows.”

Cara’s famous brows are dominantly Dramatic: low-set (even dipping far below the tops of her eyes), thick, well-groomed, dense, dark, elongated, and intimidating. But they’re not perfectly straight and horizontal. Their moderate curve is Ethereal.

Cara’s face has a lot of Dramatic and Ethereal (also some Gamine), making her brows especially harmonious for her look.

Image credit: "File:Cara Delevingne (19406020156) (cropped).jpg" by Eva Rinaldi is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Romantic eyebrows—Beyoncé

Image Credit: "beyonce" by anamakingon is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Beyoncé is a dominant Romantic (with smaller amounts of Dramatic and Ethereal), so she’s gorgeous with these wholly Romantic brows. Their high rounded arches mimic the large curves of her forehead, eyes, cheeks, and lips.

These brows are also Romantic because they’re well-groomed, fairly thin, and tapered, becoming extremely thin at the outer thirds. This tapering helps to suggest fluctation of emotion, a hallmark of the Romantic vibe. The intense curve of the arches also embodies this fluctuation.

Ingenue Dramatic eyebrows—Taylor Swift

Image credit: "TAYLOR SWIFT" by Thaís Santos / @thaistitina is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Taylor is an Ingenue Dramatic Gamine. Here she looks a bit Ethereal, which makes sense given that Ingenue and Dramatic when combined in one face can have a very similar vibe to Ethereal—gentle and otherworldly.

Taylor exemplifies how people with a lot of Ingenue can sometimes pull off really thin brows.

Her brows’ thinness and paleness is Ingenue (delicate, gentle, dainty). What adds Dramatic is that they’re very low-set and have sharpness to their shape (compare to Beyoncé’s curving Romantic arches).

I don’t know if the eyebrow police would call these brows “scary skinny”, but regardless, they work well with Taylor’s face.

When I Googled “taylor swift eyebrows” to see what wisdom the internet had to share regarding Taylor’s brows, this article from Shape.com came up telling you how to achieve her brows—her brows the one time someone dramatically altered them for the cover of Wonderland Magazine and made them ten times thicker. You can judge whether trendier thicker brows are a better match for her dominant Ingenue style type.

Natural Classic eyebrows—Diane Kruger

Image credit: "Diane Kruger César 2018 (cropped)" by Georges Biard is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Diane’s brows are dominantly Natural—from the inner corners to the peak of the arches, they’re mostly straight and somewhat thick. They also have Classic—a gently sculpted slight arch and averageness in many dimensions. Compared to the other brows we’ve seen so far, Diane’s are more moderate—not nearly as thin as Taylor’s, arched as Beyonce’s, or intimidating and low-set as Cara’s.

If you have a lot of Natural, the thickness and straightness of Diane’s brows may work for you. If you have a lot of Classic, you could try emulating her brows’ balanced proportions and gentle arches.

Ethereal Classic eyebrows—Liu Wen

Image Credit: "Liu Wen, 2013 (cropped)" by CHRISTOPHER MACSURAKis licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Very high set and feathery brows like Liu’s are iconically Ethereal. They’re also gently curved, though less curved and perhaps slightly less elongated than we’d expect Ethereal brows to be, bringing in Classic moderation. Gorgeous brows for an Ethereal Dramatic Classic like Liu.

Gamine Classic brows—Emma Watson

Image credit: "emma watsons" by crizeel ong is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Emma is a Dramatic Classic Gamine, and her brows have playful short Gamine tails and a relatively straight shape. But they aren’t quite as sharp and shortened as we’d expect of fully Gamine brows—like Diane’s and Liu’s brows, Emma’s have some Classic moderation.

Changing your brows

To experiment with your own brows, you could follow the recommendations detailed here specific to your essences. So if you want to try Romantic Dramatic brows, you can make yours arched like Beyonce’s but add in the denseness and thickness more characteristic of Cara’s. Or if you want to do Natural Ingenue brows, you could make them elongated, horizontal and full (but not intense) to bring in Natural and make them light relative to your own coloring to bring in Ingenue. Ethereal—very high, elongated, and gently curved. Gamine—very short and sharp.

If you want to bring in Classic, then make your brows as average as possible in one or more aspects—not especially thick or thin, high or low-set, arched or horizontal, short or elongated, light or dark relative to your coloring.

If you’re nervous about altering your brows, you could first cover parts of your brows with powder or concealer to see what you’d look like with a different style. If you like the new shape of the brows, then you can remove (tweeze, etc.) the parts you’ve concealed. You could also try to digitally see what you’d look like with different brows by photoshopping or simply copying and pasting a screenshot of someone else’s brows onto your face.

Can changing your eyebrows change your style type?

In theory, changing your brows can change your style type, but the actual change is likely to be minimal. So if you’re a Natural Gamine and you drastically modify your eyebrows so that they’re highly Dramatic, the effect might be enough to make you a Dramatic Natural Gamine, at least while you have those brows.

However, because the overall amount of Dramatic is small, you’ll still look harmonious in largely Natural Gamine hair, makeup, and outfits. You might be able to look harmonious in some Dramatic detail, but not much more than that.

In actuality, I think it’s pretty uncommon for people to change their natural brows so much that they’re adding in significant amounts of new essences. In most cases, even if by changing your brows you’re adding in other essences, it’ll be small enough where those essences are insignificant and don’t influence your style type. This is partly because the shape of your brows is largely determined by your underlying bone structure, and you’d have to pluck or draw them in a markedly different shape to add in a significant amount of a foreign essence.

One reason very skinny brows get condemned may be that, when the original brow was much thicker, the altered skinny brows are introducing significant amounts of a style essence that’s not already in the face.

But if thin brows are harmonious with your style type, as is the case with Taylor Swift, then they may be the best ones for you. Unlike with body size, there’s no medical danger of having extremely thin brows. Or maybe you’ll have greater chance of getting things stuck in your eyes, but that risk may be worth it in pursuit of visual harmony.