Thanks to this article from Women’s Health Magazine, I now think of my childhood unibrow as a super power. Who knew these clumps of hair that we spend all of this time shaping, shading and maintaining actually have a purpose!
Here’s 8 Weird Things You Never Knew About Your Eyebrows:
1. They help us see
The purpose of our eyebrows is to keep stuff like sweat stay out of our eyes.
2. SO. MUCH. HAIR.
According to the Bosley hair transplant company, the average person has about 250 hairs per eyebrow. Unless you were born with a big thick uni brow (high five!) Some people can have as many as 1100 total hairs.
3. Brows die.
The average lifespan of an eyebrow hair is four months. Then new hair grows.
4. They’re crucial for facial recognition.
There was a study done by MIT that found people had a harder time trying to recognize familiar faces when they were missing their eyebrows! They concluded that brows may be more important for facial recognition than eyes themselves.
5. Brows are voice-controlled?
Brows help us signal emotions, but they’re also on autopilot: As the pitch of your voice rises, so do you’ll notice that your eyebrows do too. (You TOTALLY just tried it didn’t you). Not only that but when you make an expression without thinking, like when you’re surprised, eyebrows move in a way that’s symmetrical to each other. But when you’ve thought about the expression that you want to make… like if you’re trying to show that you’re suspicious … your eyebrows have the chance to work more asymmetrically. WEIRD right?
6. They give us a special edge
Many mammals have brows and use them to express emotions, but we’re the only species that has eyebrows against bare skin — which, apparently, provides us with an evolutionary advantage because our expressions are easier for our fellow men and women to see and interpret.
7. We’re not the first to beautify our brows.
Grooming our brows has been around a long time. Every culture and time period has had a different way of shaping them: During the Renaissance, people shaved their eyebrows off completely, while the colonial elite in 18th-century America preferred to beef their brows up using grey mouse skin.
8. Your brows say more about you than you know.
According to the book Amazing Face Reading by Mac Fuller, J.D., the type of eyebrow you have defines who you are. Curved eyebrows indicate someone who is people-oriented and needs real-world examples to understand a problem, while straight eyebrows imply that someone is more direct, factual, and logical, thriving on technical details. Angled eyebrows, Fuller says, show someone who likes to be right and strives to be mentally in-control, no matter the situation.
