A Mother Of 2 Tries The Squiggly Eyebrows Trend

From @squigglybrows on Instagram

Like many of you, I enjoy reading about fashion and beauty. I like make-up. I like hair. I like clothes. I’m bad at make-up, hair, and clothes in my real life, but I like to read about them and look at pretty pictures by people who are good at make-up, hair, and clothes.

Which is how I learned about the Instagram trend of wavy eyebrows or you can call them squiggly eyebrows

Why on earth would someone make their eyebrows look like they were drawn on during airplane turbulence? I do not know. It’s not a look that I expect to see on the red carpet or the streets of my suburb — or really anywhere outside of Instagram.

And yet, I am fascinated and must try this for myself.

Let us begin by saying, I am an eyebrow amateur. I overtweezed in my 20s so now I have thin, sparse brows that I fill in every day. But not fancy filling in. I use a brown eyebrow pencil from Maybelline that costs about $6 at Target. That’s it. No gel, no powder, no setting spray, no stencils for ideal shape. I just make my existing eyebrows more visible.

You Might Also Like: 10 Beauty Mistakes You Didn’t Know You Were Making

This is how my brows generally look.

Obviously, I would need more specialized equipment than my usual pencil, so before I started on my wavy eyebrow odyssey, I dug out a sample of some brow gel I’d gotten in a beauty subscription box. Between that and my OG brow pencil, I felt entirely prepared to wave dem brows.

Benefit Gimme Brow gel and Maybelline Brow Precise pencil

I watched a couple of YouTube tutorials on this and the girls there all did their waves freehand. I regularly screw up tracing the outline of my existing eyebrows but for some reason, I decided I, too, could simply draw waves above my brows and then fill them in. How are squiggly eyebrows trend????

Do those look even? No, they do not look even. They don’t even look like waves. They look like Lumpy Space Princess.

Convinced I could somehow fix the asymmetry in post-production, I wielded the wand of brow gel in an attempt to fill in the lumps/waves. All I have to do is stay in the lines, tweak the lumpy bits and I’m an IG make-up superstar! Go me!

Not exactly what I had in mind...

Uhhhhh, it turns out that the brow gel is a really light, sheer formula that would enhance actual brow hairs but is not a good material for creating works of freehand cartoon art on your forehead.

But never fear! I have a whole pallet of eyeshadow colors! Surely one will match the eyebrow pencil outline and create my filled in effect! Maybe this color!

That’s a dark brown, right? Should be perfect, right?

Wrong.

The color was way lighter and redder than the pencil. Also a bit more metallic than the pencil. Also the wavy effect was totally blurring away and I now look like Groucho Marx if Grouch Marx had applied his eyebrows on a roller coaster.

The only way forward at this point was to pick a different eye shadow color, attempt to define the waves with eyebrow pencil and take one final selfie.

Do I look like an Instagram model?

I decided to ask my kids what they thought and my daughter — no joke — burst into tears. My son looked at me and said, “What mad scientist made you?”

Note to self: teach kids manners right after wiping off these stupid eyebrows.

This story does have a happy ending, however. SnapChat picked up what Instagram was putting down and made a wavy eyebrow filter. You can have the squiggly brows of your social media dreams without having frighten your children or douse your head in micellar water to get rid of the silly things.