Thick or thin, natural or carefully shaped, long or short, free of makeup or filled in – these are just some of the choices we face when it comes to eyebrows. This part of the face tends to get neglected in favour of the eyes but that’s really unfair. The eyebrows play a huge part in the overall look of a face. in fact, it can define if you are cool or not. So, here are a few tips on how to take care of them right.
1. Encourage growth
Whatever shape you choose for your eyebrows, the healthier they are, the better they will look. Like the hair on your scalp, brows can benefit from increasing your vitamin intake, since vitamins A, C and E, particularly, are essential for healthy hair growth. In addition to this, you could try some topical treatments to encourage growth of healthy brows. One is using natural oils. Castor oil is particularly good for encouraging hair growth, and so are lemon oil, rose oil and lavender oil. Besides the benefits for your eyebrows, they are fragrant, which, however you look at it, is an added advantage. Then there’s mineral oil, such as Vaseline, which has also been found to have a positive effect on healthy hair growth. There’s also one other trick to get healthier eyebrows but it requires patience. Just leave them be for a year, not plucking them and not waxing them. Yep, it requires patience and temporarily stifling the urge to shape them. But, at the end, it might be worth it!
2. Know the best shape
Time has seen a lot of different fashion trends in eyebrows, from totally plucked out and painted to bushy and thick. Whatever the fad, however, experts agree on a set of parameters for the right-looking eyebrow. These are just two: the brow should start on a point at the top of an imaginary, vertical straight line drawn to the centre of the nostril under the eye, and the peak of its arch must fall in the last third of the eye, towards its outer end. This sounds pretty technical, perhaps, but it’s not so difficult to achieve. Knowing this, here are some of the most common mistakes we make when shaping our eyebrows. First, there’s the brow without an arch, a sort of inverted U. Then there is the arch that’s in the first third of the eye. We’ve seen women with brows like this in cartoons and films, and they haven’t been portrayed as positive characters. Another problem is a brow that’s too long, making the last third lower than the first, and that’s a no-no. The same goes for brows that start too low, too close to the nose. Luckily, all these mistakes are fixable, either by removing the extra hairs or filling in, if the problem’s with the natural shape of the brows.
3. Removing extra hair
Tweezing is what most of us do at home, we don’t have time to use professional services in this department. Yet these services are available if you can’t get it right, no matter how hard you try. These are waxing and, since recently, threading. While you’d expect that eyebrow professionals will logically advise that you go to a professional, because that’s how they earn their living, there is some food for thought there. If you really want the perfect shape for your brows, find the time and the money to get them done by an expert. You don’t have to do it too often, sometimes three to four times a year would be enough. Waxing hardly needs explanation but threading deserves a couple of words. Opinions on it are mixed. Supporters praise it as a less painful and more effective alternative to waxing, but opposers note that the element of permanence is a mixed blessing, because once the hairs are gone, they are not coming back and perhaps after 10 years you’d want thicker brows. Anyway, the thing to remember about tweezing, since it’s the commonest DIY technique, is to always pull in the direction that the hair grows in, and never ever to touch the upper line of hairs on your eyebrows.
4. Using makeup
Skillfully used makeup can take care of most shaping mistakes and it can also fix “inborn” problems like sparse brows. In addition, it could be a supporting tool when you shape them. When you pluck your eyebrows, one eyebrow expert recommends, first fill them in with a brow pencil to make sure you don’t pluck too much. Talking about filling in, this should start from the middle of the eyebrow and you should move towards its outer end. Then work your way back almost to the inner tip of the brow. Almost but don’t touch the tip to avoid getting an angry look. There are two main things to consider when applying pencil to your brows. First, it needs to look natural, so choose a drier pencil to avoid an overdone look. Second, work with short, light strokes between the hairs, again, to make things look natural, rather than like a painting. One alternative to pencils are coloured gels and tints. These are easier to apply, since they come with a spooly, and, in addition to tinting your brows, they effectively comb them. The trouble here is that it takes time and practice to learn how to use the spooly properly, without letting any gel get on the surrounding skin. Whatever you choose, remember to just enhance your natural look, not change it completely.
