Earlier this week, the much-followed rainbow-haired model Chloe Norgaard posted a photo to her Instagram. In the selfie, she’s missing calculated parts of her eyebrow, which instantly caused a commotion. “Mira esta ceja,” one person wrote. “I’ve been thinking I kind of want to do that with my eyebrows,” said another. Then, the Mail Online asked if they could use the photo for their “story on the eyebrow slit trend.”

And therein lies the problem.

“This is not a new trend,” says Camonghne Felix, a regular TeenVogue.com contributor and social justice activist. “This has been in the hip-hop community for a long time.”

Patrice Grell Yursik, the founder of the celebrated blog Afrobella, notes that even the use of the word “slits” is wrong. “The traditional term from hip-hop is cuts,” she explains. (The Root’s Yesha Callahan cautions that renaming this “cultural legacy” is a micro aggression.) “And my first recollection of this look would be Big Daddy Kane…he was the first rapper to make that an iconic look of his.”

Photo: Raymond Boyd/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

The resurgence of the look is somewhat ironic, Patrice adds, considering Jay Z once rapped the words, “Three cuts in your eyebrows tryin’ to wild out,” to mock people for biting Big Daddy Kane’s style. Now, well, teens featured on Buzzfeed and Seventeen are doing exactly like that.

This is yet another example of cultural appropriation, what Camonghne describes as “the phenomenon when the dominant culture takes something that belongs to a subculture and makes it seem like something they created.” The phrase has been repeated countless times on the internet, including recently from Amandla Stenberg about Kylie Jenner’s cornrows. (Speaking of Stenberg, her viral video called “Don’t Cash Crop On My Cornrows” is a pretty excellent crash course in the topic. You can check it out below.)

“It’s dismaying sometimes to see people appropriating styles that were around before them, yet not acknowledging that these things came before them,” Patrice explains. “This is appropriating something to make yourself seem tough and on the edge.”