You only need to scroll through social media to see how influential eyebrow fashion is these days: brows on fleek, the brow life chose me, brows before bro’s… the list goes on.
Basically, eyebrows are life and cannot – under any circumstances – be underestimated in the world of beauty. Especially if you want to create a ‘lewk’ to be remembered.
Enter: the fishscale brow, the latest eyebrow-raising trend in the world of fashion, and not one to be forgotten about anytime soon.
From the touch-up artist who brought us moon brows, high heel brows and pencil brows (yep, those are all now things), fishtail brows are certainly making an impression – and they’re here to stay.
The eyebrow in question belongs to Sude Alkan, an influencer based in Turkey with more than 279K Instagram followers. But while you might think the impressive fishscale design has been drawn on by Sude herself, it hasn’t.
In fact, it hasn’t been drawn on by anyone at all, as the brows are actually Photoshop edits by Stefan James – a 20-year-old who runs his own modelling agency, Skyz Agency, which initially started out as editing page SkyzEditz.
Stefan also worked his magic on Rose Maniego, an influencer with 250K followers:
Speaking to UNILAD, Stefan explained how he managed to transform a simple editing page into a successful business:
It started off doing edits of influencers such as brow trends but I gained some amazing friends and connections with the models who I did the edits of and now I personally manage them.
So how did he come up with the concept of fishscale brows? Well, Stefan says he created the design last year but they weren’t always going to be named as such. In fact, they were supposed to be called Godzilla brows ‘due to the resemblance of the scales from the monsters’.
However, when he took the advice of the women modelling the brows, all of them agreed that fishscale ultimately sounds better and would less likely scare people away from the design. Which, fair.
The 20-year-old says he ‘loves’ seeing his editing be brought to life, which is lucky seeing as though Stefan’s already had a few girls send recreations of the brows to him on Instagram – something he describes as ‘incredible to see’.
Opening up about the criticism he’s faced for his designs, Stefan explained how he’s found the beauty industry to be relatively unsupportive of what he does.
Stefan told UNILAD:
Everyone’s really against the eyebrow trends as it’s different to what people are used too. However, that’s not going to stop me as I do it for fun and like creating random stuff which makes people go ‘huh’.
It’s all about creativity for me. I guess closed minded people don’t really like to see change. However we’re living in a new era and being creative and thinking outside the box is probably one of the best thing.
I personally love to see other people do it, if not everything would be so boring and mainstream.
To those who criticise his designs – although I’m not sure why they would – Stefan has only these words: ‘Be more open minded and you’ll enjoy life more!’
Kudos. So who wants to help me figure out how to create this design in real life? Anyone?
No? Okay then, looks like I’ll be walking around with butchered eyebrows tomorrow…
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A Broadcast Journalism Masters graduate who went on to achieve an NCTJ level 3 Diploma in Journalism, Lucy has done stints at ITV, BBC Inside Out and Key 103. While working as a journalist for UNILAD, Lucy has reported on breaking news stories while also writing features about mental health, cervical screening awareness, and Little Mix (who she is unapologetically obsessed with).