TREND Well-shaped eyebrows flatter your face

A natural brow with a strong arch is in vogue.
HARTFORD COURANT
Each year Americans spend millions of hours and even more dollars plucking, tweezing, cutting, shaving, dyeing, waxing and even threading (an ancient Indian and Middle Eastern method) their furry eyebrows into submission.
Why? To keep from looking like Mexican artist Frida Kahlo -- she of the artistic, unashamed unibrow. Some particularly hairy beings may have been born to grow their arches into a single brow, but most of the planet prefers two, thank you very much.
"Most people will do something to remove the unibrow," said Ramy Gafni, a New York makeup artist. "The eyebrows should be classic. You're going for two separate entities."
Pronounced eyebrows
And yet, the unibrow -- or monobrow, as some prefer to call it -- is very much on the mind these days. "Frida," the new movie about the life of Kahlo starring Salma Hayek, stays true to the artist's most famous facial feature, the unibrow, which Kahlo emphasized and exaggerated in her self-portraiture. In the movie, Hayek sports a single luxurious line of brow (although Kahlo's equally famous mustache is shortchanged).
"She almost could bring the unibrow into fashion," Gafni says of Hayek.
Almost. Even Gafni knows that someone as gorgeous as Hayek looks better with separated brows. Still, Hollywood has had a fascination for women with spectacularly pronounced eyebrows: Joan Crawford, Lauren Bacall, Elizabeth Taylor, Audrey Hepburn, Annette Funicello, Sophia Loren, Helena Bonham-Carter, Demi Moore, Julianna Margulies and even Madonna.
All of these actresses had in common lush, expressive eyebrows. And each knew the power of her brows. Why shouldn't she? Throughout history, women -- yes, and men, too -- have enhanced, shaped and groomed their brows.
"In each period (of history), the eyebrow, the chief indicator of emotion and expression on the face, has spoken louder than any word that has issued from the lips," author Robyn Cosio writes in her definitive beauty book, "The Eyebrow."
"Governed by tiny muscles in the forehead, eyebrows can't help what they say. They arch when they want to show surprise, knit together with concern, and they can operate independently from one another in expressions of anger, irony or joy. Much of the time their human owners have little control over them. So it surprises no one that eyebrow decoration throughout the ages has been an attempt to corral, control, highlight and emphasize those independent critters whose job it is to frame the face."
Facial window dressing
Few people know this better than Victoria Gheorghias, brow expert and waxing specialist for the Frederic Fekkai salon in New York.
"If eyes are the windows to the soul, then eyebrows are the window dressing: They can be gorgeous, or they can ruin everything," Gheorghias said.
"This season, you have to get them right because the brows are back in a big way."
The trend, Gheorghias said, is for a thicker, more natural brow with a soft arch. Gone are the thin, high penciled brows so popular on the runway seasons ago.
"If you've overplucked in the past, hide the tweezers and learn to use a brow pencil," she said. "If you've never groomed your brows, now's the time to learn how."