‘I’m never fully dressed without my brows!’

When I was younger I never knew eyebrows would be this important. In fact I don’t actually think they were. Ok, yes, maybe they had to be ‘tidied’ i.e plucked away at like there was no tomorrow but there was no such a thing as brows ’on fleek’, ‘powerbrows’, ‘scousebrows’ or a million and one pencils, pomades or powder products to use on them!

Notice, that they’re now referred to as brows not eyebrows too. Have we dropped the ‘eye’ from ‘eyebrow’ because they’re now freestanding, unique and equally as important as the eye in beauty terms? Interesting! We’ve become obsessed and in my opinion quite rightly so! In fact, maybe we should be calling them the iBrow because we’re like the Apple fans you see lining up at 5am to get the latest Apple product or iPhone version – we’re (im)patiently waiting for the next must have brow trend to burst on the scene and demand we’re ready to buy into the latest trend, ready to pluck, thread, wax, tint, draw, add glitter- anything to step up the ‘brow game’.

Now, from the iBrow to My Brow…To me, those two bold strips of hair above my eyes can often dictate how I feel, make me late for some occasions and are quite frankly far more important to me than most other facial features. You can keep your on trend lip fillers, your teeth whitening kits and jawline Botox… I’d much rather a ‘decent’ brow because truthfully, I never feel fully dressed without my brows. But… it is hard to keep up! Can we please decide on a ‘one-size-fits-all brow model’ and stick to it for longer than a few weeks?! Years of over plucking them between waxing meant I’ve had no choice but to reach for the brow powders, pencils, gels, stencils… the lot, you name it I’ve probably tried it! As soon as I managed to actually grow something (with the help of lots of Vaseline) that was a ‘real work of ARCH’… the arch went out and now I’m stuck back at square one with an overgrown tadpole look on my left brow and a bushy hedgerow with a few bald patches on my right brow… patiently waiting for this look to come in to fashion… anytime soon? And lastly, a note about the famous ‘Scousebrow’, despite all the bad press it and the women/men who sported it received, is more than just a fashion trend. It’s a place marker, a sign, a status, it was a unity between girls from one city that I don’t think any other city in the world has. But for me, the Scousebrow isn’t that thick, black, drawn on sharpie look and the image of the Desparate Scousewife that all the press and bloggers tend to focus on. It’s the eyebrows you see as you walk around Liverpool on real women in real life not reality stars and scripted characters. We should be noticing and appreciating the care and attention and money spent on beauty and fashion from women so proud of the city they’re from and live. We might be known for our football teams and our music but the Scousebrow also got us known and noticed, often in an unfair and negative way.

Holly Saron, Edge Hill University

Where did ‘Scousebrow’ originate?

Although we are not focused on one type of brow, as part of our project we are interested in finding out what people think about the ‘Scousebrow’. It has gotten negative press and snark (not linking, but easily found), and we’re interested in knowing whether such attitudes are shared by those who live in Merseyside. In order to understand the brow, you can go to YouTubers who describe what it is and how it’s done. These are varied and, looking through them, the ‘how to create the Scousebrow’ video advice peaked around 2014.

A question we are sometimes asked is: where did the word originate? It may not seem like it, but the word emerged relatively recently in 2011. For more detail, take a look at this academic paper which considers three English dialects (Scouse, Geordie, and Cockney) and a selection of related words in online searches. The author describes two details that are useful for this project. The first is that Scouse is only in use to describe someone from Liverpool since 1945 (Jensen 2017, 53) and, the second is that Scousebrow came into use thanks to the Channel 4 scripted reality TV show Desperate Scousewives (2011-12). Scousebrow became a major search term online in Scouse-related words reaching a peak in 2016 (Jensen 2017, 61-63). This is a fascinating phenomenon that has had wide-ranging coverage and interest. We would love to know how you feel about the Scousebrow, if you are from Merseyside and sculpt and craft your brows. So, come to our event at FACT from the 25th-28th of April and tell us about your brows.