As Ziggy Stardust and Queen Elizabeth knew, a bare brow — bleached, stripped or powdered to invisibility — can transform the face and everything it conveys to the world.



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When the model Kristen McMenamy shaved off her eyebrows for Anna Sui’s fall 1992 collection, the look was shocking and watershed; the ’90s had arrived, weird and grungy. No more big-haired bombshells, no more Christie Brinkley prom-queen smiles. With her jet-black hair and a forehead now made entirely of negative space, McMenamy looked half-alien. Like Ziggy Stardust before her, that was probably the intention.

If the eyes are the windows to the soul, then our brows are the custom dressing that frames the view. They wrinkle thoughtfully in conversation, furrow sympathetically in concern, prove to our friends that we’re paying attention, ratchet separately up our faces when we’re feeling skeptical.

Without them, you’re asking the beholder to participate — to project an emotion where there is none provided. For the recent fashion shows, many designers, including Alexander Wang, Marc Jacobs, Sarah Burton at Alexander McQueen and Riccardo Tisci at Givenchy, sent out models whose brows had been rendered invisible. With void faces, the meaning of the clothes was amplified. Wang’s military vibe and gray palette became all the more aggressive underneath starkly hooded eyes; Burton’s eyelet dirndls and patterned furs were twice as ethereal. Which is not to say the absence of brows didn’t make a statement in itself: It was transformative, and a little bit transgressive.

The Bare Brow, Then and Now

A gallery of the look, from the Mona Lisa to the latest collection from Alexander McQueen.



A strong brow has been a part of the stylish face for decades — Audrey Hepburn, Brooke Shields, Cara Delevingne, pick your generational icon. Being willfully without them, like Rooney Mara as the girl with the dragon tattoo, is punk. Andy Warhol began bleaching his platinum white so that his gaze alone would convey ambiguous sexuality. (“I had a lot of dates but I decided to stay home and dye my eyebrows,” he once said.) More recently, the boundary-pushing pop icons Lady Gaga and Miley Cyrus have both dyed their brows blonde. No eyebrows? No interest in being conventionally pretty.

But can you imagine Vermeer’s “Girl With a Pearl Earring” looking half as dewily beautiful with two stark arches across her face? Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa is browless (though recent science suggests that might be the work of a zealous restorer), and the 16th century’s Queen Elizabeth didn’t have much to express herself with, either. There is something about removing the feature that makes the face seem to glow, all uninterrupted skin and complexion. Renaissance-era Europeans rubbed oil on their children’s foreheads to stunt hair growth; perhaps browlessness also carries the allure of innocence.

My own eyebrows have always matched my hair, which is the color of straw. It used to be that my great hope was for two bold dashes that you could see — and read — from across the room. Now, I realize there’s mystery in a naked face.