At the VP Debate, Eyebrows Were the Windows to the Soul

There was an eyebrow-raising amount of tweets going on during Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate that had nothing to do with policies, facts, or temperament.

People could not stop commenting on Gov. Mike Pence and Sen. Tim Kaine’s eyebrows … or lack thereof.

In fact, Mashable published a story last night that declared Kaine’s eyebrows the winner of the debate (graded on a curve, of course). And in true Twitter fashion, the senator’s brows already have an account of their own.

So why have onlookers become ultra-focused on the battle of the brow? And furthermore, what is their purpose in the first place? (The eyebrows, not the candidates.)

Well, our eyebrows are actually a dominant feature in facial recognition, according to behavioral neuroscientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. They concluded that the sudden disappearance of eyebrows on familiar faces resulted in a “very large and significant disruption” in identification. “In fact, a significantly greater decrement in face recognition is observed in the absence of eyebrows than in the absence of eyes,” wrote the researchers in their abstract, which was published in the journal Perception.

The 18 volunteers were instructed to identity 50 faces of those in the public eye (a few of the famous faces included Winona Ryder, Demi Moore, and President Richard M. Nixon) where the study authors (thanks to Photoshop) created two new versions of each celebrity — one without eyes and one without eyebrows.

Surprisingly enough, the participants recognized the eyeless public figures nearly 60 percent of the time, yet could only name the eyebrowless stars 46 percent of the time.

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The investigators theorized that tweezing the brows away may be erasing someone’s emotions and other nonverbal signals. “As with other facial features, the eyebrows may exhibit changes in appearance over the time scale of many years, but over weeks or months these attributes of the eyebrows can serve as reliable cues to identity,” they wrote in their study paper.

So whether they’re raised, on fleek, or arched, our eyebrows are speaking, even when our mouths are shut. So if you find that you’re drawn to or repelled by someone based on the shape or the twisting of their brows … pluck it.

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