I don’t think there’s a single person on Earth who hasn’t looked back at old pictures of themselves and thought, “What the heck was I doing with my eyebrows?” It’s a simple fact of life: The ways we groom ourselves evolve with us over time, and comparing our old selves against the current one rarely paints a flattering picture in our own eyes.
This near-universal experience has been given a catchy new name in a meme format that’s taken off on TikTok: “eyebrow blindness.” It’s a pretty self-explanatory video format: People (usually of the younger variety) show a video or photo of themselves in the present before cutting to a picture or video from their past—the most notable difference being their eyebrows. In the versions of this meme that have gone the most viral, the ghosts of eyebrows past are usually thick and blocky, a look that was all too popular in the 2010s. Their current-day counterparts are softer, smaller, and more realistic-looking by comparison. The whole thing is meant to imply that these people had no idea how extreme their eyebrows looked back when they were going too hard on the brow pomade and refusing to pluck a single stray hair.
After swiping past the first few eyebrow blindness videos that popped up on my For You Page, I thought nothing of it. At its core, this meme is just a way for people to poke lighthearted fun at themselves and the ways they experimented with their look once upon a time. And eyebrow regret is a tale as old as time—millennials and Gen Xers already did this whole dog and pony show when we woke up one day and collectively realized we’d leaned too hard into skinny eyebrows, creating a generational overplucking crisis from which we’re still recovering in the process.
Then I saw other iterations of beauty “blindness” popping up: money piece blindness, blush blindness, faux freckle blindness, the list goes on. And that’s the point that I realized what eyebrow blindness really is: an excuse for participating in a trend culture people don’t want to admit they’re susceptible to.
I’ve written about this at length before, but the beauty industry has historically told women and femme people that the most desirable eyebrows are the ones they don’t currently have. The eyebrow ideal has flip-flopped between thick and thin like clockwork at the turn of pretty much every new decade. Take these really thick eyebrows from the 2010s that we’re all laughing at in these memes: The pomade-heavy block brow became popular as a knee-jerk reaction to sparse brows caused by the aforementioned overplucking crisis from the 1990s and 2000s. That ideal evolved into what would become the feathered but still thick ideal of the late 2010s and early 2020s. Now, that ideal is evolving once again into something slimmer and flatter.
As a society, we’re willing to go to extreme lengths to adhere to whatever eyebrow standard is set for us at the current time. We plucked them with a magnified mirror at every given chance in one decade, we hoarded Anastasia Dip Brow in the next, then we slathered them in growth serums so we wouldn’t have to use so much of it after that. These aren’t choices we made because we were unaware of what our eyebrows really looked like—these are choices we made because we were hyper aware of what our eyebrows really looked like.
To attribute your beauty mistakes of the past as any kind of “blindness” is to say that you weren’t responsible for them, but that’s the thing: you are! There are two elephants in the room with these “eyebrow blindness” videos, and the first is the cyclical and increasingly extreme nature of eyebrow trends. At the end of the day, eyebrow standards are beauty standards, and beauty standards enforce obsession with ourselves. We are constantly comparing our own eyebrows to those we consider perfect—and that’s the thing about perfection: it isn’t achievable. Back in 2014, I would’ve killed to have Cara Delevigne’s eyebrows. But even if I had literally copied and pasted them onto my own face, I still would have looked at them and said, “They need to be bushier.”
The other elephant is the fact that we all play into these trends knowingly and willingly regardless of our age and what’s currently popular. We might push our eyebrows to extremes that we view differently in retrospect, but that doesn’t change how aware we were of the choices we made to get there. In striving for eyebrow perfection, we aren’t oblivious to the actual appearance of our own faces; we grow oblivious to the impact ever-changing beauty standards have on us.
(There’s also the arguably offensive nature of referring to all of this as “blindness” at all, but that’s a form of ableism that warrants its own story. For the time being, perhaps we stop using the term “blind” as a synonym for “ignorant”? )
In so many of these viral eyebrow blindness videos, the on-screen text and captions often say something like, “Why didn’t anyone tell me how ridiculous I looked?” At that time, you probably didn’t look ridiculous. Because you were following the norm. You may think you looked silly with those blocky brows now, but that wasn’t blindness. Even if you were following trends that led to retrospectively extreme looks, it was still a way for you to figure stuff out about yourself and how you like to look.
Not to sound like that one guy who hangs out alone at your local bar and talks your ear off about his long-gone glory days against your will, but I’m finally getting to that age (read: 30s) where I simply do not have the energy to care about keeping up with those norms. I just want my eyebrows to look like my eyebrows and to not have to work at them so much. But to the even younger folks out there who are starting to look back and realize how much their own aesthetics have changed, own that. Stay willing to change your own appearance when you want to. It’s what’ll inevitably help you determine what you—and you alone—want to look like later in life, hopefully free of trends and made-up ideals.
More in beauty news:
- I’m the Child of a Facetune Mom
- Don’t Be Fooled By Oprah’s Newfound Approach to Diet Culture
- Have We Been Overdoing It On the Sunscreen?
Now, watch eyebrow trends evolve throughout history:
