For years beauty salons have been selling the same formula: the brow should be lifted, the tail pulled upwards, the arch pronounced. We all know the result - a face that looks permanently surprised or permanently angry. A study published in the Aesthetic Surgery Journal says the audience actually wants something else.

The study is titled "Beauty Lies in the 'Eyebrow' of the Beholder" and was led by Jeffrey E. Schreiber. The method was simple: respondents were shown photographs and picked the ones they found attractive. Then researchers measured what the eyebrows of the chosen faces had in common - height, arch, thickness, position.

What the answers showed

Attractive eyebrows, according to the results, sit lower than professionals recommend. The arch is discreet, with a soft curve. The thickness is medium - neither a thin line nor a violently drawn block. And the tail does not go up; it sits slightly further out from the iris, with no lift.

Plastic surgeon Steven Dayan, commenting on the findings, puts it directly: it is probably "lower and more natural than we think". As for the heavily lifted tails - the so-called "fox eye" brows that have been circulating online for years - he says respondents rated them as very unattractive. They look severe and rigid.

Why the industry does not say so

This is where the arithmetic gets interesting. A lower, more natural brow means fewer interventions. Fewer interventions mean fewer appointments, fewer products, fewer services repeating every three weeks. The perfectly natural brow is the one that bills the least - which may explain why the recommendation has run in the opposite direction for decades.

This does not mean the salons are lying. It means a trend requiring constant upkeep has better business logic than a trend that asks to be left alone. The difference between those two things never appears on a price list.

What is left from the research is uncomfortably simple: the thing we pay to fix was probably already right before we started.