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The artist, Frida Kahlo, often portrayed herself with a notable unibrow.
A unibrow or monobrow, medically known as a synophrys, refers to a "confluence of eyebrows"; i.e. the presence of abundant hair between the eyebrows, so that they seem to converge to form one long eyebrow.
The words unibrow and monobrow are now in the Oxford English Dictionary, and unibrow was added to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary in 2006. Medical dictionaries, such as Dorland's Medical Dictionary, now contain the word synophrys.
The unibrow conventionally has negative associations in Western culture, and is the reason why many people remove excess hair between the eyebrows.
In Western perception, a unibrow may make a person seem fierce, grumpy, or over-serious, so much so that that the unibrow has become something of a cliché in fiction, especially with cartoon characters.
Among Western women, the region between the brows is often plucked, waxed, or treated with electrolysis or other forms of depilation. Unibrow separation is often the only form of eyebrow grooming (a stereotypically feminine behavior) among men. However, in some non-Western cultures this facial hair does not have a stigma, and may even be seen as a sign of feminine beauty, as in Turkey and the Caucasus. |
