How to Remedy a Brow-Plucking Disaster
We could wax rhapsodical for hours and hours on just how important brows are for your face at large, and while that may be overdoing it just a little, it isn’t far from the truth. Brows are the anchors of your face, the focal point, the frame that highlights your bone structure and makes you you.
But with celebrity eyebrows to aspire to, and errant hairs going all over the place, at-home tweezing is kind of our guilty pleasure, even though we know it’s often more trouble than it’s worth. We’ve all pulled out two brow hairs when we only meant to grab one, or plucked one we really, really shouldn’t have. If you’re finding yourself in this predicament as we speak, here’s how to bandaid the issue—and how to do a better job next time.
Put down the tweezers.
First things first: don’t try to remedy your over-plucking by plucking more in a misguided attempt to “even things out.” Get the tweezers out of your hands, take a deep breath, and if things are really bad, have a glass of wine. Continuing to tweeze to make your brows match or to make one look more… normal will only serve to make things worse, so find comfort in the fact that once you stop tweezing, that’s the worst the situation will get. Don’t dig yourself deeper.
Use a growth serum.
There are plenty of products that are formulated to stimulate hair growth and enhance what you do have. We’re usually quick to write these types of things off as a waste of money, but we’ve experienced firsthand just how helpful brow growth serums can be. (We also cannot fully confirm that there isn’t some placebo effect involved, what with how badly we want our brows to grow.) The cult favorite RapidLash Eyelash and Eyebrow Renewal Serum is just about as good as it gets—and affordable, too.
Pencil, then powder.
You’re not going to go out with your eyebrows looking like that, are you? Of course not—because why would you when you can dress ’em up, and nobody will ever know that you went a little tweezer-happy? Filling in seriously screwed brows is a two-step process that should start with pencil to sketch out the desired overall shape, and a brow powder applied with a small, angled brush (like you’d use for gel eyeliner) to mimic the growth pattern and texture of authentic brow hairs. The pencil works to lay the foundation and create the correct shape, but the powder is what really makes filled-in brows look natural.
Do better next time.
If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again… but be conservative. Laying into your brow hairs all willy-nilly with tweezers is the fastest way to wreak havoc on their shape, so start first by giving careful thought to what you’re going to do. Use a clean spoolie or brow brush to comb the hairs upward and get a better sense of their natural arch so you know where you should be plucking in the first place. If there are any that seem incongruously long, use brow scissors to trim them rather than remove them entirely. Instead of tweezing all over—at the inner corner of the brow, at the outside, above the brow—focus almost entirely on what’s underneath the brow, where tweezing is safest.
And for the love of god, do not use a magnifying mirror. It totally warps the way your face looks, so you’ll have no real sense of what your brows look like until you step away. (While you’re at it, don’t use a magnifying mirror ever. They only ever seem to cause problems.)
Read more from Daily Makeover: 9 Unfortunate Cases of Bad Celebrity Eyebrows
