I once watched a documentary about people who were in love with inanimate objects. A man who made love to his car. A woman who married a piece of the Berlin Wall. A body pillow. A statue. The Eiffel tower. I never really understood it. They seemed weird, creepy, perhaps mentally unwell. But now, I’m beginning to understand. Because I am in love with Lily Collins’ eyebrows.
She has always had them. If you’ve seen her in Mirror, Mirror – where she plays Snow White – or The Blind Side, or Love, Rosie or The Mortal Instruments, then you may have spotted her impeccable brows, thick and dark and dense. But they have made themselves even more known this month, thanks to Emily In Paris. Lily plays the stylish – if slightly basic – marketing executive, barrelling around the French capital. She dresses in couture and speaks in perfect quips. But her brows are the scene stealers. I can’t get enough of them. If I had to pick a favourite - as if her brows were Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep in Kramer vs. Kramer and I were the toddler offered a traumatic ultimatum - I would select her left one. But it’s a really close contest.
Lily Collins’ eyebrows are two, blackened ferns in a dappled wood. Lily Collins’ eyebrows are a noble ravens’ wings in eternal flight. Lily Collins’ eyebrows are two dark caterpillars in procession on a distant jungle vine. Lily Collins’ eyebrows are two Sable ponies, cantering on a snowy field. Lily Collins’ eyebrows are a pair of Stygian vessels, trailing each other on an abandoned waterway toward oblivion. Lily Collins’ eyebrows are twin comets, hurtling silently through the celestial void. Lily Collins’ eyebrows are two, oil-drenched cormorants, floating in a tempestuous ocean.
Lily Collins’ eyebrows are starstruck lovers, observing each other in lust from parallel balconies but forbidden to touch in perpetuity. Lily Collins’ eyebrows are twin ink smears on a page of an acclaimed essay about Shakespeare’s sonnets. Lily Collins’ eyebrows are two distant Himalayan caverns, viewed from the summit of Everest. Lily Collins’ eyebrows are the splayed leather boots of a Parisian courtesan on the bedroom floor of a penniless writer. Lily Collins’ eyebrows are two, thousand-strong starling flocks, flickering across an autumn dusk.
Lily Collins’ eyebrows are a gift from God. A bonafide miracle of genetics and grooming. I worship at their altar, and pray that she is never hit with a Sleeping Beauty-esque curse where, entranced, she will stumble upon a spiral staircase, at the top of which sits a maliciously enchanted pair of tweezers.
Am I crazy? Perhaps. But I am far from the only one. ‘Lily Collins’ eyebrows mesmerise me’, tweets one fan. ‘How do Lily Collins’ eyebrows do that?’ asks another. ‘Lily Collins won the eyebrow game’, proclaims another. Somehow, two clumps of hair on a woman’s face are unanimously declared to be something magical. Grazia has already advised fans on how to achieve their glory themselves.
Left eyebrow: keep being you. Right eyebrow: you’re doing amazing sweetie. And remember, you’re in this together.
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