The Unibrow will NOT be white-washed for the new beauty trend. #Unibrowmovement

Arts & Culture

BY Chelsea Mtada

January 13, 2021

The Unibrow will NOT be white-washed for the new beauty trend. #Unibrowmovement

The REAL faces of the #Unibrowmovement are People of Colour.

On the 11th January 2020, Dazed Beauty published their round-up of “10 beauty trends set to dominate in 2021.” Featuring a reposted a picture of model and influencer @sophiahadjipanteli with a following of nearly half a million on her Instagram, adorning blown-out blonde hair, over-lined lips, and a striking unibrow.

Dazed Beauty says “For 2021, we’re starting to see messy, artful brows with a cool sense of DIY about them. Think untweezed, fluffy, freshly bleached brows done over the kitchen sink, or dark, overgrown cool brows.” This is not the first time a white woman has been celebrated for having a “look” that has only been deemed beautiful and trending when she is the face and not the brown/black people whom the look originates. I guess my only surprise is that this is still happening in 2021.

The Instagram post quickly sparked a very important conversation about why, in 2021, the features and unique beauty of Black and Brown women continue to be white-washed for the sake of trend and popularity. The problem here is not the fact that Sophia has created a persona that celebrates her uni-brow and makes her stand out in a sea of high-maintenance, super-tweezed, and conforming eyebrows. The key issue is that a publication like Dazed Beauty has made Sophia, a white woman, the face of it.

South-Asian beauty influencer @linnygd asked the relevant question underneath the post that continues to be an ongoing conversation in the comment section. “Why would you have a white woman as the face of the unibrow movement where the unibrow has a significant cultural importance in South Asian, Middle Eastern cultures ?”

“Why would you have a white woman as the face of the unibrow movement where the unibrow has a significant cultural importance in South Asian, Middle Eastern cultures ?”
@linnygd

As we continue to break through the standards of western beauty, we are only going backward if we do not acknowledge that not everything is a trend. From box braids to uni-brows it is key to celebrate the beauty of people of colour, before white women adopt the same beauty practices and it all of a sudden be labeled “trendy” and the “overgrown cool brow”. With a lot of people of colour, having a unibrow is not a choice or a trend that they can try for a season, for likes and followers. Unibrows and grown-out body hair is deeply rooted in the black/brown identity; it is something that has caused a lot of trauma and insecurity in the POC community and deserves to have the correct representation in popular media. If there must be a face for the #unibrowmovement, then that face needs to belong to the culture it comes from.

I repeat, a white woman cannot be the face of a feature that people of colour have been mocked, ridiculed, and shamed for. Content Creator; Zorawar Waraich added to Dazed Beauty’s comment section when they said, “One white woman is born with hair in-between her eyebrows, and now it’s a trend. Erasing all the trauma that POC immigrants like myself with untamed eyebrows carry.”

“One white woman is born with hair in-between her eyebrows, and now it’s a trend. Erasing all the trauma that POC immigrants like myself with untamed eyebrows carry.”
Zorawar Waraich @zeesw

As the conversation continues, we hope that the true message is clear. The beauty of people of colour must be celebrated ON actual people of colour, before it becomes “trendy”. Here are some of the stunning faces, you should check out and celebrate. The true non-gentrified faces of the #unibrowmovement.