Did you catch Stellan Skarsgard thanking his "Chernobyl" makeup artist at the Golden Globes last Sunday night? The actor said he's been told his face isn't particularly memorable.
"I realized it was because I don't have any eyebrows. Nobody can tell if I'm angry or surprised," he told the audience as he accepted an award for best supporting actor in a television series. (For the record, he does, in fact, have eyebrows. They're just blond, like his hair.)
"It's not like Colin Farrell," he continued. "You can tell if he's angry 20 miles away, but for this film, Daniel Parker made a couple of eyebrows for me.
"And ... " he said, raising his trophy, the biggest award of his 50-year career.
It might have seemed like a throwaway remark to fill an acceptance speech, but Skarsgard underscored what fashionable women and men already know: Your eyebrows do a lot of work.
Photo from Michelle Nicole / A client's before-and-after photos show her eyebrows transformed from scraggly and thin to dark and defined at Elea Blake Cosmetics Studio."Eyebrows frame the shape of your face," says Jessica West, owner of Chattanooga's Skin & Brow Room and Lash Market. "They're really important and can really add to somebody's features."
Anatomically speaking, eyebrows serve a couple of basic functions: They direct moisture from sweat and rain away from our eyes; they can catch dirt, dust or dandruff before it falls into the eyes; and they help shade the eyes from bright light.
All very practical. And if that's all they did, we probably wouldn't give them much thought. Like our ears, they'd just be something that hangs on our head.
But eyebrows are also one of our most expressive facial features. You can telegraph your emotions simply by moving your eyebrows up and down. How menacing would your frown be if your eyebrows didn't furrow together? How surprised would you seem if your eyebrows didn't arch? Is it even possible to express skepticism without cocking an eyebrow?
"You need brows to frame your expressions," says Elea Xylem, operations manager at Chattanooga's Elea Blake Cosmetics Studio.
So eyebrows help us express ourselves nonverbally, but there are other ways they help us communicate. Scientists say eyebrows also figure into facial recognition. In a 2003 study reported by www.healthline.com, scientists asked a group of test subjects to identify 50 famous people from a group of photos manipulated so that the faces either had no eyes or no eyebrows. Sixty percent of the time, the subjects could still identify the famous faces when they lacked eyes. But when the faces lacked eyebrows, the subjects could identify the faces only 46% of the time.
More recently, scientists have offered a hypothesis that expressive eyebrows are "a biological mechanism to demonstrate to other people what we're genuinely feeling," similar to blushing, says online news site Vox. Penny Spikins, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of York, and her colleagues offered this new insight into how eyebrows "speak" in a 2018 report published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution.
The researchers believe that our foreheads "facilitate empathy," Vox reports. "They are a canvas upon which our eyebrows can paint emotions. And as we became an increasingly social species engaged in increasingly sophisticated communication, they helped us survive."
Science aside, British newspaper The Guardian declared brows "the beauty obsession of the decade" in 2016.
Celebrities with memorable eyebrows
Jack BlackEmilia ClarkeCara DelevingneColin FarrellPeter GallagherEugene LevyGroucho MarxJack NicholsonMartin ScorseseBrooke ShieldsAppropriated eyebrowsSee Jack Nicholson’s eyebrows superimposed on the faces of other celebrities at https://www.instagram.com/brows_nicholson/
Chattanooga native Katheryn Golden, a beauty aesthetician and makeup artist now living in Nashville, affirms what Skarsgard learned about giving his brows a boost.
"Yes, they're really that noticeable," she says. "When it comes to makeup, makeup artists usually do eyebrows first and then the rest of the face. Eyes are the window to the soul, and the brows are the focal point."
Chattanooga brow experts West and Xylem say there's no longer a single trending look in celebrity fashion, such as Brooke Shields' bushy brows in the 1980s or Pamela Anderson's pencil-thins in the 1990s.
"It's more about the shape," says Xylem.
Pay attention, she says, to celebrity brows. No longer do Hollywood A-listers try to pluck or brush their brows into a single prevailing shape. Instead, they want brows that enhance their eyes or face shape, "whatever looks the most complimentary to their features."
West says her three Skin & Brow Room shops see "lots of clients who overtweezed in the '90s" who are now coming in for microblading, a process that deposits pigment into skin, mimicking hair strokes. She recommends restraint starting out.
"We always start with a base line, and you can always come back and add more fullness, more length. You definitely don't want to throw on some Kardashian brows for someone who barely has any now."
The Elea Blake studio offers services such as waxing to shape the brows and tints to darken and define them.
The real bonus may be in the anti-aging magic of stellar brows.
"I think it's the cheapest face-lift you can get if you do them right," says Xylem.
Contact Lisa Denton at ldenton@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6281.