By Tatiana Boncompagni – Full Article
More women are getting brow transplants to address overplucked arches. The catch: The new brows need weekly trimming or they could grow ‘down to your feet.’
Inspired by 2000s pop stars such as Gwen Stefani and Fergie, Alanah Pearce overplucked her eyebrows in high school. In the years that followed, the Los Angeles-based writer and actress tried, unsuccessfully, to fix her “uneven, patchy” arches with serums, makeup and semi-permanent tattoos. Then the 32-year-old heard about eyebrow transplants, a procedure that uses hair from the back of the head to thicken brows.
Pearce, who was tired of having to struggle with brow powders and pencils in the morning, said she got a transplant in 2024 “out of laziness. I just wanted to be able to wake up and go.” She said her new brows look natural and she spends less than 10 minutes getting ready. “Huge fan!”
Alanah Pearce via Instagram
According to plastic surgeons in Los Angeles and New York, eyebrow grafts are becoming more popular among women, especially those who overplucked in the 1990s and 2000s and want the full, fluffy look popular today. Celebrities such as model Chrissy Teigen and author Robin McGraw have publicly raved about their transplants. 
The procedure, performed under local anesthetic. It’s a mostly painless procedure that comes with some swelling and bruising. When done well, the results are natural and permanent (though sometimes touch-ups are needed years later).
There’s just one catch: The transplanted hairs grow much faster than regular eyebrows—not to mention indefinitely—so they need weekly trimming.
According to RealSelf, a digital platform where consumers search for providers of aesthetic services, page views of eyebrow transplant-related content grew nearly 10-fold from 2022 to 2024. Dr. Jason Champagne, a facial plastic and hair restoration surgeon in Los Angeles, said interest in brow transplants tripled four years ago, when celebrities started talking openly about the procedure. That “helped bring the conversation into the mainstream,” said Champagne, who has given new brows to Teigen and the actress Meagan Good.
Eyebrow transplants date back to the early 1900s, when doctors harvested “strips” of hair from a donor site on the scalp and grafted them onto the eyebrows. In the 1990s, doctors switched to the follicular unit transplantation (FUT) method, which involved implanting very small groups of follicles. Today surgeons typically use follicular unit extraction (FUE): harvesting and implanting individual hairs.
Depending on the technique used, at least half of the 200 to 375 grafted hairs fall out within six weeks, and if the surgery is successful, they begin to grow back in three to four months (in the meantime, patients use powder or pencils to fill in their brows).
The never-ending trimming is a major drawback. But Pearce, the writer and actress, remains undaunted by the upkeep, using a small pair of eyebrow scissors for trims. “I like to make jokes about how if I ever end up in a coma I might be able to braid my eyebrows right back into my hair.”
