When someone says eyebrows I think of model Cara Delevingne or Kylie Jenner … both of them have an amazing brow game.
What are eyebrows really for though other than to make us look fabulous? Surely there has to be some sort of medical reason we have them, right?
Well, it turns out eyebrows are rather important. Beauty issues aside, eyebrows are a great way to express yourself. Think about what you can say (without saying a word) by just arching a single brow?
But even more importantly eyebrows keep moisture out of your eyes. When we sweat or even when it rains, our eyebrows help keep your eyes relatively dry and that helps you see better but also it helps because the salt in your sweat would irritate your eyes, making them sting.
But what if we didn’t have eyebrows? What would we look like? Not to worry, I have two horrifyingly scary examples for you. Here is Taylor Swift and Angelina Jolie.
Researchers at MIT found that faces without eyebrows are like land without landmarks: It’s almost harder to recognize them. In their 2003 study, participants were asked to identify photos of celebrities with one catch: Their eyebrows were removed. Interestingly, participants only recognized about 46% of the faces. And they even had trouble with really famous ones like Richard Nixon. Past work from MIT has examined the role of eyebrows in emotional expression and nonverbal communication, as well as in facial aesthetics and sexual dimorphism. This study took the study of eyebrows further and found a significant disruption in the participant’s ability to recognize someone with their eyebrows removed.
The average person has 250 hairs per eyebrow and they have a lifespan of about four months. In comparison, the hair on your head has a life cycle of three to seven years. Your brow hair grows faster in the summer because of the warm weather. But it’s not just weather that affects the growth of your eyebrows. Stress can cause your brows to grow slower or not at all.
