Brow Maintenance

Brows are meant to be sisters not twins…

This is what the lady who waxes my eyebrows tells me each month. I am sure if you are like me you will know the exact pain of having over plucked during your teenage years. There are a couple of blank spots in the shape where there should be hairs. The shape is not quite what it should be. While they are not quite as bad as I make out to be, it is one of pet peeves women often have about themselves. (pores, hair, weight) Just another thing to bemoan and obsess over. I do have regrets especially when my mother points it out and says my face it ‘ruined’ because of eyebrows *sigh* then proceeds to tell me what I should have done when I was a teenager. My counter argument to her is this :1. She didn’t bother to get off her bottom and take me to beauty salon when she should have. 2. Nor did she bother herself to teach me properly how to pluck my brows thus, my brows are like this today. As you can imagine that goes down like a lead balloon. However she is an archetypal Chinese mother so she really cannot help herself. (Chinese mothers are stern, unforgiving, shouty, impatient, and rubbish at teaching their young.) It’s okay though you quickly learn from a young age to counter act their arguments with history and logic. I have gotten to the point in my life where I am the one teaching her about how she should apply her make up. I digress…. So how do I go about showing my brows to the world. Well it took me a while to get the hang of it, and find a happy medium. While I love the Cara Devigne and Lily Collins full strong eyebrow look, when I have tried to emulate the look it just looks really fake. There are however a couple of products that I swear by…..

Brow Zings by Benefit £23.50

A coloured wax and setting powder, brushes, tweezers and mirror.

I do go to Benefit to get my brows waxed about once every 6-8weeks. They often after waxing, go to town with tinting my brows colouring them in with this combo, and in their excellent salesmanship, try and get me to buy this and several other products at the same time. Don’t get me wrong I like the look that the Benefit employees have but it’s a tad to polished and done for my style. My fiancée often knows when I have been because I look like a “Painted lady”. Not sure if that is a complement or an insult. I do love this product as you can use this with a lighter hand than the girls at the Benefit counter and get a more natural look. However I have put this a the back of my makeup drawer simply because it is so fiddly to use every day. On a normal day I give myself 20mins to do my face, and this just can’t be factored in every day. Perhaps because I haven’t mastered it properly yet… anyone out there can use this with their eyes closed yet? The coloured wax does tame the unruly hairs and the setting powder well, sets it all day. In the wee kit you do get two brushes for application, a flat one and a angled one. Best of all there is a tiny tinnie pair of tweezers to pull out stray hairs. It is a really dinky kit and good for travel.

Speed brow by Benefit £13.00

A brown gel to tame unruly brows in small mascara tube.

I use this on a daily basis. I really do need to get another one as this one is proper manky. If I am not sporting any kind of eyebrow pencil or colour I will always put this on to tame any flyaways. My eyebrows are fairly long and are prone to sticking on my forehead so this does the trick to keep them in the right place. The gel is slightly tinted brown, however on the eyebrows I don’t really notice a huge difference in colour. (apart from the fact that the hairs are behaving themselves). If you have massively long eyebrow hairs that need cultivating I would recommend that you give this a go. You will quickly find that you can’t live without it.

Kevyn Aucoin Eyebrow pencil in Brunette £19 from Space NK.

This is a slim pencil that is perfect for filling in gaps in your brows. I find with other pencil that they are so chunky that by the time you finished filling in your brows the effect is really fake looking. The colour is really good as well, a lot of brow pencils I find too dark, and I have black hair! The pencil itself has retractable lead, and the texture of the pencil is slightly waxy so it helps a little bit with the grooming the hairs in the right direction. There is a spooly brush on the other end of the pencil which you can use to comb your brows or smudge the product with. It’s small enough to actually draw on hairs if you want to, I usually smudge the colour in my eyebrows with the brush or my fingers. This product really enhances your brows in a really natural way that isn’t drawn on, or tinted on. It makes you look like that you never had any plucking accidents in your teens and you have perfect brows. Which let’s face is the look that everyone ‘really’ wants. I normally don’t take this pencil with me. In the morning I apply my make up and leave it at home, I find that it lasts me the day. I have read from other reviews that this pencil does not travel well. The lead end of the pencil does not have a lid, so if too much of the product is out of the pencil it tends to break/crack off which results in wasted product. So if you like to take your brow products with you this probably isn’t for you. What brow products do you swear by?

Always interested in new suggestions and try new things.

Thanks for reading Carrie x