Thread lightly: An arched look at what has shaped the eyebrow across centuries

Power politics, silent films, flapper-girl culture, even Ancient Egyptians mourning the death of a pet cat, have all played a role.

It has quite the arc, the story of the eyebrow. Distinct styles through millennia can be traced to evolving ideas of bravery and beauty, even evolving technologies such as cinema and sound. All the way back to Ancient Egypt, eyebrows have served as a canvas for creativity.

(Clockwise from bottom left) Bella Hadid’s straight brow; an Egyptian wall painting depicts thick, bold brows; bushy brows on ’80s icon Brooke Shields; the barely-there eyebrows of the Renaissance, in Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa; Greta Garbo of the silent era; a Roman mural of a couple from Pompeii sporting the unibrow. (Wikimedia Commons; Getty Images)

Experimenting with them is easy, in the quest for finding one’s personal style. They also grow back easily. “As a result, for centuries, both men and women across social classes have shaped and