Mikaela Shiffrin Details Why Fans Are Seeing Her with Half an Eyebrow at 2026 Milan Olympics
- - Mikaela Shiffrin Details Why Fans Are Seeing Her with Half an Eyebrow at 2026 Milan Olympics
Desiree AnelloFebruary 12, 2026 at 1:15 AM
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Mikaela Shiffrin details why she's missing half an eyebrow
Mikaela Shiffrin/Instagram
Mikaela Shiffrin revealed why fans may notice that she’s missing half her eyebrow while competing in the 2026 Milan Cortina Winter Olympics
“It’s the Olympics … there's like cameras around and there's people around … I think it was a fully reasonable thing to do at the time,” the decorated skier joked of her decision to switch up her look
Shiffrin finished in fourth place in the women’s team combined event alongside teammate Breezy Johnson on Feb. 10
Mikaela Shiffrin is sharing the real reason she seemed to be missing half an eyebrow during the 2026 Milan Cortina Winter Olympics.
On Monday, Feb. 9, the Olympic skier, 30, revealed that she accidentally did “something not great” while performing “general maintenance” on her eyebrows just days before competing in her first race.
“If you see me in the next few weeks with half an eyebrow, no you didn’t,” Shiffrin began in a video shared to Instagram. “I have this scar from years and years ago when I was doing balance training. I fell off the balance thing, my bad! My eyebrow split open. A plastic surgeon put 30 stitches all in there.”
“I didn’t really know that you could get like thirty stitches in your brow bone, but you can,” she added. “It fits. Now I have this scar. So sometimes with the scar, my eyebrow hairs grow a little bit funky like a Truffula Tree.”
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After determining that the natural direction of her eyebrow hairs resembled the multicolored trees from Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax, Shiffrin decided to try embracing her scar by shaving “a little slash like the cool people who have slashy scars.”
“I think it's a really cool look and whatever,” she said. “How bad could it be? Because I have the scar already, there’s a map on my face. I will follow the map.”
Once she started going ham with the tweezers, however, it wasn’t long before the ski legend “went a little bit too far.”
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Mikaela Shiffrin on Feb. 10
Julian Finney/Getty
“It’s the Olympics... there's like cameras around and there's people around... I think it was a fully reasonable thing to do at the time,” Shiffrin quipped. “The thing is that with the makeup, it comes off when I sweat.”
“I sweat predominantly from my eyebrows and upper lip with goggles,” she continued, noting that there was a “high likelihood that I’m going to cross the finish line and I’ll just have half an eyebrow.”
The decorated skier then went on to remove all the makeup that was on her eyebrow, revealing a very noticeable bald patch underneath.
“The moral of this little story is that if you see me in the next few weeks while she grows back in … if you see me in the next few weeks at the Olympics with half an eyebrow, no you didn't," Shiffrin concluded. “You have the backstory now and it is what it is.”
Shiffrin won a gold medal in the slalom event at the 2014 Sochi Games and gold in the giant slalom and silver in the combined events at the 2018 Pyeongchang Games. The Colorado native has missed out on the podium during the 2026 Milano Cortina Games so far. On Tuesday, Feb. 10, teammate Breezy Johnson and Shiffrin finished fourth in the Alpine women's team combined.
To learn more about all the Olympic and Paralympic hopefuls, come to people.com to check out ongoing coverage before, during and after the games. Watch the Milan Cortina Olympics and Paralympics, beginning Feb. 6, on NBC and Peacock.
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Source: “AOL Sports”
