Across the world in Italy, athletes are skating, skiing and sledding to Olympic medals while chasing national and world records.

On Friday in Gainesville, Ziba Ahmadi of Ziba De Beaute salon and Vida Hosseini from Melbourne worked spools of white thread around their fingers, plucking and threading hundreds of eyebrows for free for nearly eight hours during a world-record attempt. 

Ahmadi, who’d already broken her own Guinness World Record for the most eyebrows threaded in one hour (102) and is the winner of the 2026 Fierce Award, threaded alongside Hosseini as they fought to beat a record set in Australia of most eyebrow pairs threaded by a group in eight hours. 

Although the duo came up short of the record’s 450 with 337, Ahmadi and Hosseini threaded more eyebrows than they had in that amount of time and inspired the community along the way.  

“It was a unique experience for me. I loved it,” Hosseini said. “We didn’t break it, but I loved it.”  

Friday’s record attempt took place in the parking lot of Ahmadi’s 13th Street salon. Persian cuisine sizzled on the grill of the 47-year-old Iranian’s family food truck, Galan Kebab, and single roses bloomed for sale ahead of the Valentine’s Day weekend.  

Female and male passersby, whether University of Florida (UF) students or working parents and professionals, and pre-registered clients came out to support Ahmadi and Hosseini’s attempt.  

Some had been servicing their eyebrows with the world’s fastest eyebrow threader for years, while others tried it out for the first time during her record attempt.  

“I expected it to hurt,” said Seth Haber, a UF student. “I knew nothing about how the eyebrow process works. I did some research ahead of time, and I’m like, oh, it’s actually pretty fascinating.”  

According to The Lash Lounge, the practice of eyebrow threading dates back 6,000 years to the Middle East and South Asia.  

A brow technician wraps two strands of cotton string around pieces of hair to remove them from the root. It can take around four weeks before the hair grows back.  

On Friday, volunteers handed out numbered slips of paper decorated with an Iranian flag to track the number of attendees.  

Cutting white thread from the spool with their teeth and twisting the strands around bandage-wrapped fingers, Ahmadi or Hosseini threaded the pairs of eyebrows in less than two minutes.  

Volunteers took headshots of the clients with their numbers before and after to document each threading.  

“It’s cool, like, the world record she’s trying to do,” said Juliette Zapata, also a UF student. “So I was like, oh, it’d be cool then to go support the community.”  

Unlike other records that might only need the person in order to accomplish it, Ahamdi’s record was dependent on how many people showed up to get threaded.  

Ahmadi said she signed up in December to go after the goal, advertising around town and online that she needed 500 clients. With 641 people signed over the next few weeks, she was confident that more than enough would show.  

Spending all of Thursday in preparation, Ahmadi said she didn’t sleep the night before. But Friday’s 337 and having to close shop early, after so many signed up to be there, turned out to be a disappointment.  

“I’m good, I mean, I’m gonna work tomorrow and the day after,” she said. “This is not something bothering me [except] when people don’t keep their word.”  

Ahmadi said she will go after the record again, but only once she’s back in her home country, Iran. If she does it in the U.S. again, she said she’ll likely charge attendees instead of making it free, so there’s a greater incentive to show up.  

For now, she’s looking ahead to hosting the Nowruz & International Festival for the fifth year in a row on March 7.  

The event celebrating Nowruz, the Persian New Year, will take place from 1 p.m. to 6 p.m. at 2441 NW 43rd Street in Gainesville, and feature food, live music, dance and cultural performances from around the world.