One of my favourite (of the moment) pass times on the train to work is looking at people’s eyebrows. My word, they all look the same. It is as if everybody (women, mainly) pluck, draw, sketch or tattoo the same brow on to their foreheads… even if it doesn’t suit them….So here’s how to look great with uneven eyebrows…
It’s only when you reach a certain age (ahem) that you appreciate how pretty you were all those years ago. In only 10 years time you’ll look at a picture of your younger self and wonder why you spent so much time and money ‘correcting’ things.
All those ‘faults’ you kept finding like the eyebrow that was thicker and higher than the other or the slightly uneven nose are in fact the so-called imperfections that serve to highlight the beauty in the rest of you and add charm and individuality to your looks.
The trend for fake-looking eyebrows beats me
So the current trend for big, glossy, and quite fake-looking eyebrows beats me. They take away attention from your eyes, possibly the most key feature of your face.

It doesn’t matter if one eyebrow sits higher above the eye than the other. Because most faces are not symmetrical. To paint even eyebrows onto an asymmetric face looks….odd. Uneven eyebrows are not a ‘problem’. It is nature’s way of balancing your face while making you look distinctive, ie not like everybody else.
Why on earth would anyone want perfect, symmetric eyebrows when, in most cases, they don’t flatter their face but often make them look slightly ‘fake’?
Uneven eyebrows and ‘not trying too hard’ is very much the Scandi look. It’s not about perfection, in fact, it’s about imperfection and how to cope with it 🙂 It’s about a natural look no matter what age, colour or size you are.
But with a background in beauty culture, we appreciate as much as the next woman the need to ‘help’ nature along. And there are many ways to improve on a weaker eyebrow that are both low-maintenance and low cost.
The first step to fixing an eyebrow problem is probably also the most difficult: appreciating the ‘imperfection’ and the way it adds individuality to your face.
Work with what you have rather than try to rearrange your face: there are several things we can do to ‘help’ our eyebrows and here are some of our favourites:
Plucking Eyebrows with good Quality Tweezers
Only pluck under your eyebrows, never the upper edge, to ‘lift’ your eyes. Pick any stray hairs under the brow and avoid over plucking. Some hairs grow back, but not all.
Some beauticians say the brow should start in the centre of the face where the eye starts and swerve outwards towards the temple where it gets thinner. Brows that start further in towards the centre of the nose make you look narrow eyed, while brows that start further out make you look wide-eyed. As with any beauty tricks, plucking excessively to get that trendy wide-eyed look if your eyes are not set wide just gets you a weird look. It really is possible to great with uneven eyebrows and gentle plucking is advisable to avoid hairs disappearing for good.
And do use quality tweezers – speaking from experience, some cheap ones merely cut the hairs and sometimes the skin too rather than pluck them. The skin above the eyes, as well as below, is very sensitive so avoid scarring.
Look great with uneven eyebrows: just fill with Liner or Brush
Needless to say at the Scandi Look we’re not convinced by the trends for brow lamination or micro-blading where ‘hairs’ are tattooed onto your skin. A little glitter on the lids and above the lids is glam and festive but ‘greasy’ eyebrows or tattooed brows? Brows are there to stop sweat from dropping into your eyes and to frame your face – even small changes to the brows can transform your face. Proceed carefully. Overworked eyebrows look a little….desperate.
To make the brows stand out or fill in thin patches we suggest using an eyeliner to draw hairs – which will be a temporary measure as is likely to disappear in the shower. Or use specially designed shape and shade pens as fillers – there are so many tools and products on the market it really isn’t necessary to resort to drastic, permanent measure which you may regret.
Liz Jones’ Eyebrow Transplant: Read all about it
Speaking of regret – read Liz Jones’s eyebrow piece in the Daily Mail, in which she mentions how she has come to regret over-plucking her brows when she was younger.
In this piece, at the grand old age of 60-plus, she opts for an eyebrow transplant and now feels like a teenager again. It is nothing short of hideous. The agony and expense involved to get thicker eyebrows is breath taking. Read here and weep!
Brook Shields and Cara Delevigne Eyebrows
At the Scandi Look we’re old enough to remember the 1970s trend for thin, symmetrical eyebrows. The 70s were the decade of both thin brows and thin lips. Then came Brook Shields, the American supermodel and ‘face’ of Calvin Klein jeans who showed us all how to great with uneven eyebrows. Her eyebrows were thick and bushy and her left brow was even lower than the other. Suddenly girls in America and Europe stopped plucking and started drawing…everybody wanted brows like Booke.
The trend has truly returned with today’s supermodel Cara Delevigne, famous for her standout feature: dark, thick brows complementing her upturned nose.
Back in the 1920s and 30s the brows were ultra thin lines, sometimes shaved off completely and barely there as a pencil line drawn above the eye. The thin brow is rarely flattering: thin brows draw attention to the nose – think eyebrows and a big nose is not a great look. Maybe that’s why thin brows haven’t made a proper lasting comeback. Today we still celebrate the thicker natural look.