ALT KILL THE FREAK: On bleached brows and the soft death of subversion

It’s a Tuesday night and my local Boots is out of box dye bleach. I’ve come, armed with only a puffer jacket and bunny slippers, in search of anything ammonia-heavy enough to burn through the pigment in my eyebrows. 

‘Bleached brows’ have become the new north star on the Pinterest boards of the chronically online. Sold to me specifically through multiple encounters of very beautiful, brow free women – and one sexually ambiguous hairdresser – all of whom have sacrificed their usual facial symmetry for a ticket into the ever-growing cult of anti-tradition. 

While I wander the aisles in search of an entrance to this peroxidised paradise, I wonder what has drawn the general public to bleach-play – and what we all really hope to gain from this new pink label Kool-Aid. 

As confusing as it is to grasp both a bleach and a matcha shortage occurring at the same point in our weird history, it’s not surprising considering the current state of affairs. Each feels like physical manifestations of a collective fever dream; of a generation that’s becoming increasingly near-sighted– physically and mentally. 

Whatever walls that used to exist between our 2D and 3D realities have collapsed. It’s increasingly difficult to tell what's real and what isn't, what will last and what will disappear by morning. There are trinkets, bows, and prize badges – weird emblems of an online, gamified world crawling outwards. Trends die before they are born. Images are machine-generated. Faces warped. Bodies distorted. Videos and voices are unreliable narrators. The world keeps accelerating faster and faster, and there’s no railing to hold onto when the ride suddenly drops. 

And in real life, stranger and more impossible mods are being made to our human avatars. The other day I watched a video of a man sitting up from a makeshift “doctors” office with bloodshot, impossibly blue eyes. The caption advertised services for permanent eye-colour changes available in South London.

It feels as though we’re all suspended in a curious state of limbo between real life and a dream state, where anything is possible and nothing is real. That we’re all moving, spinning and spewing, on a ride we can’t get off. 

Things are getting weirder. The temperature in the pot is rising. And, as the familiar archetypes - family, housing, grocery shopping - continue to crumble, it seems no wonder that young people are embracing the avant-garde. 

Though, getting a little weird is nothing new. 

Packet huffing ravers. Eyeliner riddled goths. The white people who are a little too into anime. Leaders and disciples of the occult. The subs and doms of the ever burgeoning fetish communities. Hell, even the furries. The world has, and always will, be rich in freaks. These are the abrasive wreckers of normality. The people who made space for us all by refusing to fit. 

What made these freaks so freaky was not how they looked, what they got up to on the weekends or their browser history, but the fact that their identities couldn't be absorbed, explained or sold. Their lives, desires and doings were too messy to fit neatly inside plastic packaging.

Neat or not, with a clear cultural appetite for weird, brands are after our freaks – following us down the rabbit hole and setting up affiliate links for I <3 Wonderland t-shirts.  But anti-tradition cannot exist within the walls of the establishment.

Commodification neutralises subversion because it removes its risk. What was once confusing, abrasive, or socially costly becomes buyable and safe. Refusal stops being refusal the moment it's rewarded - when you can wear it without consequence, return it for a store credit and then move on to the next thing.

The commodification of the freak and whatever ritualistic spell was used to create its watered down, ultra-consumable evil cousin, is nowhere more obvious than your local Urban Outfitters. Where there were once punks, and goths, and skaters, and hooligans, Urban has swallowed these all up and its bowels are the wet, formless carcasses of the freaks of yesteryear. Different subcultures and identities frankensteined together as interchangeable layers on a faceless mannequin. 

As we gear up for an ultra-weird winter, where alternative culture is now a buyable identity at your local Westfield, the question is not why are kids getting weird, but what happens to the locals of the scene? The real freaks. The ones whose dress signalled a desire to opt out, not plug in. 

I once had the pleasure of speaking to a man who performed poetry in the back of a movie theatre dressed as a dog. A true, green-blooded freak. When I asked him “why the fuck?” he told me that true art should make you feel a bit unsteady on your feet. 

If discomfort is no longer something that art induces, but something we live in permanently, then where does the boundary go from here? What does transgression look like if there’s no solid ground for our feed to be steady on in the first place. 

Freaks gave us space to explore – and explore we have. But their identities have been skinned and sold as artifacts of ‘culture’ for a generation growing up without much of its own. True subversion only works when it costs you something and the neatly foldable and returnable version currently on offer, hollows out the inherent friction that made freakdom matter in the first place. 

As brands continue to build their land on what was once considered fringe, the boundary keeps moving – pushing genuine outsiders further into places companies won't touch. Darker, riskier, less visible spaces. 

The true freaks will survive. They always do. They might just be a bit harder to find. 

I eventually did get my hands on bleach, though stupidly forgot the ‘tone’ portion of “can I have a bleach and tone please, a bleach and tone” and now have brows that more resemble french fries on the floor of a McDonald’s birthday party. Thank God I asked my sexually ambiguous hairdresser to cut a fringe. 

Maybe a mustard yellow eyebrow is far enough for now. 

Viva la freak!