Nowadays, our eyebrow lady is our most trusted adviser and in a world of microblading, threading, brow gels and more, it's no secret that it's all about definition. But according to a new study, rocking a thicker look could be a sign of a narcissistic personality.
Researchers at the University of Toronto examined which facial cues people typically look to when detecting others' narcissistic behaviors. In the three-part study published in the Journal of Personality, facial photographs were taken of students who exhibited traits of narcissism.
Those photos were then shown to participants, or "naive perceivers," who rated how narcissistic they believed each person in the photo to be, Miranda Giacomin, Ph.D., lead author on the study told "Good Morning America."
Next, the facial photos were cropped or "experimentally manipulated" to show just the upper or lower halves of the face.
"We found that perceivers were able to accurately detect narcissism from the upper half of the face, and the main cue was the eyebrows," Giacomin explained. "Thus, people use others' eyebrows as a cue for their narcissism."
And to be absolutely positive that eyebrows were what the participants were looking at, Giacomin had the perceivers rate the targets' brows based on various dimensions like how they were groomed, distinctiveness, and femininity. Results found that eyebrows distinctiveness, aka, how thick or dense they were, corresponded with people's levels of narcissism.
But Giacomin agrees that people have been channeling their inner Cara Delevingne in recent years, and thicker brows have been a beauty look of the moment.
"A person's preference for thick brows may be related to their desire to be attractive and popular and on trend," Giacomin said.
If thick brows makes us narcissistic, what does it mean for those who bejewel theirs?