Once, if you were talking about going to the salon for a trim, a restyle, color or shape, you’d have been talking about the hair on your scalp. But in 2023, it’s just as likely to be your eyebrows. That’s because brows are big business and growing — not just in terms of salon treatments, but also in products for home use.
The global market size for brow gel alone was valued at $264.9 million in 2021, and is predicted to be worth $431.7 million by 2031, according to Allied Market Research. In the past 12 months, 73% of US beauty-buying consumers surveyed by The Benchmarking Company say they’ve purchased both eyelash makeup products and tools and eyebrow products or tools — up from 66% in 2018.
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what kicked off our contemporary obsession with these little strips of hair — was it Anastasia Soare launching her brow concept, Anastasia Beverly Hills, in the late 1990s, a time when brows as a category didn’t really exist? Or the early noughties when women of South Asian descent, such as Vanita Parti of Blink Brow Bar and Shavata Singh of Shavata, launched brow bars in the UK, bringing threading to the Western masses?
Mandatory Credit: Photo by Pierrick Rocher/BFA.com/Shutterstock (13977538ek)
Kim Kardashian
Louis Vuitton Men’s Spring-Summer 2024 Show, Pont Neuf, Paris, France, Île-de-France, France – 20 Jun 2023
Kim Kardashian has long sported a heavier, preened brow shape.
Pierrick Rocher/BFA.com/Shutterstock
More recently, it can perhaps be traced back to 2015, when cult beauty brand Glossier launched Boy Brow, a one-swipe-and-you’re-done brow pomade that the world went wild for. In June this year, Glossier revamped the range, adding two new shades to the existing five; the company now claims that, globally, one Boy Brow is sold every minute.
