The power of brow
What a week it has been for eyebrows. First the dreadful news that not only had Mattel not asked Frida Kahlo’s family permission before they bastardised her image into a Barbie doll, but that they’d lightened her (plastic) skin and – travesty – airbrushed out the famous monobrow.
Then Audrey Hepburn’s unmistakable brows were all over the place with the announcement that Hubert de Givenchy, her designer-in-chief, had died.
And concurrently, all those ominous seeming pictures of Vladimir Putin, and those wispy, now-you-see-them-nowyou-don’t brows that are so at odds with his macho posturing. What’s in a brow? What isn’t? Audrey’s were aristocratic, glamorous and very dark (a bit beatnik). What had preceded were those spindly, semiflattened arcs that look somewhat disfiguring to us now. Besides seeming modern and architectural, Audrey’s brow also became an emblem of all that is timeless.
Not that Audrey’s brow was immutable. Exhibit A: Irving Penn’s 1951 portrait of her which shows an attenuated and etiolated iteration. See how a brow can date you, as well as placing you firmly in a social class and – more contentious, but true nevertheless – influence how intelligent you look.
At some point in Audrey’s trajectory, Hollywood’s Brow Groomer To The Stars (assuming they had one) got hold of mark 1 and worked it into something much more distinctive and bold.
The Hep-brow became a thing – revered, copied and, notwithstanding the fact that it has always been upheld as the paradigm of a classy brow, the template for today’s Scouse brows.
Frida’s unibrow on the other hand was freighted with defiance, pain, cultural identity and no small degree of original beauty. One can imagine the conversation around Mattel’s boardroom table and how brave they all felt on agreeing that Fri-bie would have a marginally thicker brow than standard Bim-bie.
I don’t completely condemn the toy brand’s appropriation of Frida, although it would have been nice if they’d gone about it more intelligently and sensitively. But, conceivably, this could introduce millions of small girls to the notion that there are many ways a woman can feel valued. Instead of the usual boobalicious airhead Barbie, they now have an artist they can Google. This could be the first time some of them ever encounter a natural womanly brow.
Not so long ago, Cara Delevingne was custodian of The Natural Womanly Brow, but she’s ancient history to today’s batch of six-year-olds, although still highly regarded by older brow fanatics who, in another story this week, are paying as much as £6,000 to have brow transplants to look like her.
So whose brows does the average six-year-old study? Adwoa Aboah’s, whose brow colour, density and texture seem to change by the day, as befits a model as culturally and socially diverse as she is?
Look and learn children. What’s in a brow? Everything.