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It’s midnight and you’re scrolling TikTok’s For You page. It’s filled with beauty hacks, GRWMs, and ever-more-realistic beauty filters. Filters that show what you’d look like with the perfect creamy shade of blonde hair. Filters that map out where your contouring products should be placed. Filters that tell you your ideal eyebrow shape. In your late-night delirium, the endless ultra-smoothed beautiful faces have convinced you that, actually, all you need to do is bring these filters’ advice to the real world and you’ll look like them. So, you reach for the box bleach or tweezers or fake tan and get to work. The results? Hit and miss.
The most recent #BeautyTok filter to convince me to rashly change my appearance is called, simply, “eyebrows.” Created by Grace Choi, an AR/XR beauty expert and TikTok Effect House Ambassador, the filter, which went live in February 2022, adds mapping to your face and was designed to “help you draw your perfect eyebrows.” It’s ridden waves of virality since launch, currently being used on thousands of videos.
Choi is one of the most popular filter creators in the beauty space, with 3.6M likes on her videos and a lot of viral filters under her belt, like “find your face shape,” “color analysis,” “Julia Fox eye,” and “Bella eyes.” Choi says she created the eyebrows filter out of a personal need, telling Allure “the inspiration behind the eyebrows filter was really born out of my personal struggle, of not being able to draw even eyebrows with my sparse eyebrows and lack of facial landmarks. Like, I don't have a mole that I can reference.” She spent a month researching the filter, which draws heavily from Anastasia Soare's Golden Ratio brow shaping technique. “I researched different techniques of how people do eyebrow mapping and then adapted it to make sure it moved to everyone's face, using augmented reality,” Choi explains.
Choi’s work is scientific. She says she “doesn't do deformation” when it comes to filters, preferring to create something more educational. For all the filters to go viral and inform people’s beauty decisions, this is arguably the best-case scenario: It is using techniques from experts, and 1000s of people trying it on TikTok are loving the results.
Anyone who experienced the early aughts trauma of overplucking is likely relieved to have a way to do a non-committal test before you reach for a set of tweezers. Makeup artist Emily Wood believes filters like Choi's are a positive tool. “Most of us have been through all the eyebrow phases in our lives: over-plucking, thin pencil brows, coloring them thickly like a coloring book,” she says. “Unfortunately, some of those brows have never recovered.” As Wood notes, there are no hard and fast rules about what someone should and shouldn’t do to their brows, so these filters can help people decide what they like.“I think it’s amazing that there are tools like this available to all people of all ages, to help guide them should they desire it,” she says.
While these filters can provide a helpful tool, the experts we spoke to also advise against taking them as the end-all, be-all for how to shape your brows. Although TikTok has become a hub for creativity amongst beauty lovers, it has also become yet another vehicle to push unrealistic beauty ideals and standards — from the normalization of editing skin texture to TikTok shop making us feel like we need every new serum on the market. This is undoubtedly creating new insecurities for young people. Although filters are, in essence, just a bit of fun, it’s key to try and ground yourself in your own tastes. Do you really like the latest trend? Or are you just being conditioned to buy into it?
“Every human is different and has different desires and looks,” Wood says.“Just because some people have enjoyed this and found it to be a positive experience doesn’t mean everyone will.” If you already like your brows, she cautions against changing them just because Choi's filter recommends a different shape. “Some people may use this filter and believe this is the ‘right way to look’ but don’t actually want to change,” Wood says. For those people, “I would recommend steering towards what they feel is right for them and what they enjoy. Changing or enhancing our appearance is about expression of personality and if it doesn’t feel like you, don’t feel the need to conform.”
Plus, not everyone is sold on the filter’s ability to turn you into a brow-shaping pro. Suman Jalaf, a London-based “International BROW Magician” who has clients like Deepika Padukone and Sonam Kapoor feels strongly that we should leave it up to the experts to do any real-life shaping. “Brow experts create a custom brow, that’s as bespoke as you are,” Jalaf explains. “You’re in their hands with your actual face, features, skin tones, skin texture, brow hair texture — all of this matters.”
Michele Holmes, a hair and brow artist dubbed “The Eyebrow Whisperer” by the San Francisco Chronicle, feels that experts and AI filters can work together. “Filters are a really fun way to temporarily enhance your eyebrows or try a different shape and size to see if it feels like a match,” Holmes says. Once you’ve virtually found a shape you like, “I would highly recommend seeking a professional who can look at you IRL in 3D to determine the best shape for what nature gave you in the brow department.” The filters, she says, often don’t take the “muscles, hair growth, and [other] subtle differences” on each side of our faces into account. “Nobody is an exact mirror image blueprint of themselves," Holmes says. “If you were to print one side of your face that is your favorite and copy the reverse image of that side to study, it would not be a match.”
In more extreme cases, people have run with Choi’s filter, and rather than just drawing a new brow shape, they’ve turned the trend into something more permanent, often using a dermaplaning razor to shave off part of their eyebrows where the filter indicates they should end. I was one of these misguided people, swept up in the fun and chaos. Jalaf warns against doing this: “The shaving part is a hell no for me, as you have no control over how much you remove or get carried away.” But don’t panic if you’ve already done this, the damage isn’t permanent. What does Jalaf suggest if it all goes wrong? “If too much is taken off, you throw that plastic blade thingy in the bin! And don’t touch your brows for at least 6 to 8 weeks,” she says, noting that massaging cold-pressed castor oil into your brows every night can help nourish them.
Luckily for me, I didn’t take too much off. If anything, I was overly cautious and left wanting a more drastic change. My partner has been asked, “Do you think I’d look good with bleached eyebrows??” too many times to count. This, for me, is where filters turned out to be a godsend: After trying a bleached brow filter the answer was a resounding “nope!” (However, I was convinced to let my natural hair grow out over the last year, thanks to a filter that showed me how I’d look going from blonde to brunette.)
My creativity and love for beauty will always lead to me experimenting, and being warned against something will only push me to do it more. It’s the classic, and very human, pressing of the big red button response. If you’re the same, Wood leaves us with some sage advice: “I know the impulse can be so strong to drastically change your appearance at 10 p.m. on a Wednesday,” she says. “If we can resist this (difficult, I know) there are so many ways we can test a new look.” Instead of shaving or plucking off your brows’ ends, she suggests using the soap brow technique to stick them down and then cover them up by lightly patting a concealer on top and setting it with powder. “For my more drastic friends who thrive off the impulsivity, bleaching the ends of the brows will give you the thrill without the permanent effects (we love a dye back),” Wood says.
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As for Choi, she thinks anything that sparks creativity is a positive force. “I love that something I created is delivering so much delight to so many people,” she says. “It's sparking curiosity and creativity! And that's all I can really ask of anything that I make to do. People are doing something adventurous and trying something new, and they're happy with it.” So go ahead, use the filters — just put down the tweezers first.
Read more about things the internet made us do:
I Tried the Silk Curler That Has TikTok in a Chokehold
My Eyebrow Microblading Won't Fade and the Reasons Why Make Me Regret the Treatment
I Tried the Color Analysis That's All Over TikTok
Now let Huda Kattan walk you through her everyday routine:
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