Celebrity Eyebrow Regrets: Stars Share Brow Beauty Mistakes

Eyebrows are such a simple way really to make a gorgeous statement with one’s face or look like someone came after you with a razor. Celebrities have had plenty of serious brow disasters and aren’t afraid to talk about it.

After the 1990s made pencil brows a major trend, many stars who were teens back then rocked the look, thinking it was the bomb. Now looking back in photos, it is cringeworthy. Kim Kardashian loves to post throwback photos of herself as a beautiful young lady growing up, but there was a long period where she had very thin eyebrows in the snapshots.

Fortunately, the SKIMS founder can laugh about it today. In 2018 when her mom, Kris Jenner, shared a throwback photo to 1997 while holding little sisters Kendall and Kylie Jenner, Kim was seen over her mother’s shoulder with the thinnest of eyebrows.

Celebrity Eyebrow Regrets — Courtesy of Kris Jenner/Instagram

“I look horrendous! I was obsessed with Drew Barrymore and her thin eyebrows! And I discovered glittery bronze eyeshadow,” Kim wrote in the snapshot’s comments. The look was enough to make fellow celebrity Katy Perry joke next to the photo, “Tell Kim to show us that look’s makeup tutorials pls,” of the KKW Beauty founder’s unfortunate pencil-thin brow trick.

Even though Kendall was a toddler in the photo, she too would grow up to have eyebrow issues. “When I was younger, on a totally weird whim, I plucked out all of my eyebrows! Thankfully, they grew back, but my sisters flipped out,” she confessed on her website, adding after her plucking fail, “I had to go to camp with all the cute surfer boys. Completely. Mortifying.”

But as she became one of the most in-demand fashion models of her generation, Kendall must deal with others giving her eyebrow regret. “I think the worst is when designers want to mess with my eyebrows … It always freaks me out because every time they do it, I lose them. They literally fall OUT!” she shared with fans in the same post, adding her most feared eyebrow procedure is, “getting a bleach.” She’s not alone, as eyebrow bleaching is one beauty procedure that Jennifer Aniston has vowed to never repeat.

These days, for stars who damaged their brows by over-plucking them as teens, they can fix the problem with an eyebrow transplant. Chrissy Teigen did that by having hairs taken from the back of her head and transplanted into her brows. She shared the results with her fans on Instagram, and her doctor explained the benefits of the procedure, which can cost between $4,000 and $7,000.

Deal of the Day

This ‘Slimming’ Suit is Just $16 Today! View Deal

“Eyebrows play a huge part of the facial aesthetic. They frame the eyes and can either be an asset to the eyes, or they can be the annoying part of your morning you have to spend ten minutes filling in,” Dr. Jason Diamond wrote on Instagram next to Chrissy’s “after” photo.

He added, “I know too many people, entire generations, who either over-plucked brows as part of the trend or are simply experiencing eyebrow thinning with time. #EyebrowTransplantation is a procedure where we mutually agree on shape, density, etc., and skill takes it from there.” Fortunately for some stars like Zendaya, nature did the trick with her thick, bushy brows growing back on their own after a waxing job as a teen went awry.

Scroll down for celebrities who have had major regrets about the state of their eyebrows.

Kim Kardashian

Kim has always been open about how much she regretted her overly-plucked eyebrows as a teen. In a throwback photo with her older sister Kourtney, the SKIMS founder joked, “It’s the brows for me …” When her mom, Kris Jenner, posted a similar photo from the era showing Kim and her pencil-thin brows, the reality star commented, “I look horrendous! I was obsessed with Drew Barrymore and her thin eyebrows! And I discovered glittery bronze eyeshadow.”

Jennifer Aniston

The Morning Show star told Elle in 2015 that the one beauty mistake she would never repeat is, “Bleach out my eyebrows, I will never do that again. It was my first Cosmopolitan cover (in 1997) and Kevyn Aucoin was doing my makeup, and all of a sudden, I had white foam on my eyebrows. It was a real look in the ’90s, and it looks gorgeous if you’re Linda Evangelista. I was so new and naïve in the business, I didn’t know that I could say ‘no.’ I had to paint in my eyebrows for three months with brown shadow.”

Olivia Wilde

The actress-director’s brows look great today, but she’s put them through a lot over the years. “When I was 5, after watching my dad shave, I took his razor and shaved my face — including my eyebrows. You look like an alien without eyebrows,” Olivia revealed to InStyle. She added, “Then, in my mid-teens, I plucked them to create that sexy Kate Moss arch. I regret it because I damaged my follicles, and now it’s hard for me to grow thick, bushy brows.”

Kendall Jenner

Designers beware of Kendall’s brows if she’s modeling in your show! “I think the worst is when designers want to mess with my eyebrows … It always freaks me out because every time they do it, I lose them. They literally fall OUT!” she shared with fans on her website. The model added, “It’s bad — I really hate getting a bleach.”

But Kendall has her own regrets about what she did to her brows as a teen. In the same post, she shared, “When I was younger, I plucked out all of my eyebrows! I had to go to camp with all the cute surfer boys. Completely. Mortifying.”

Zendaya

The actress has thick, gorgeous brows today, but she had a beauty crisis in her younger years. “I got my eyebrows waxed once, and they messed them all up — they were super-thin,” she told Twist magazine. “It was the first day of middle school, and they were uneven! It was so bad. I had to let them grow out and [they] get super-hairy and thick.”

Chrissy Teigen

The cookbook author underwent an eyebrow transplant in November 2021 after advising, “Teens, do not pluck them all off like I did.” Unfortunately, after sharing her procedure on social media, Chrissy got shamed for “rich people problems.” She refuted her makeover by telling haters in an Instagram Story, “WHY are people so riled up over any little thing I do? You’re gonna give yourselves a heart attack.”

Tori Spelling

Seen here in 1999, Tori came to regret her Beverly Hills 90210 eyebrows. “I shouldn’t have plucked my eyebrows so thin in the ’90s,” she told E! News in 2017, adding, “It was a big deal in the ’90s! No one ever told me the brow would be back, and now the brow is back. It’s something that, when you pluck, it’s really hard to get back.”

Lucy Hale

“I was always the little girl with a unibrow. And then, I went through a brow evolution of different looks,” the Pretty Little Liars star told Cosmopolitan in 2015. “Now, I don’t really do anything to them. Because I’ve had horror stories where either I over-plucked them, or finally they grew back out and I let someone touch them, and it was a disaster … I’ve finally found the shape that worked for me, so all I do is fill them in a little bit. Long live the big brow!”

Demi Lovato

One of their biggest beauty regrets is the many phases their eyebrows have gone through. The singer told Refinery29 in 2016, “My ultimate beauty regret is the many shapes and forms my eyebrows have come in. I’ve had stages where they’ve been so thick where people have asked if I got eyebrow extensions, and then so thin it looks like I just drew them on.”