I could give Frida Kahlo a run for her money in the brow department. My eyebrows also grow ridiculously fast, which is both great and annoying. I have had a lot of different styles over the years. It usually went this way: I saw some amazing arches in a film or on a blog, and I rushed to the mirror and did my best to copy the look. Some of my efforts include straight Korean brows (or as close as I could get), classical arches from the diagrams you see in magazines (which, by the way, only work on classically shaped faces), and an almost perfect copy of Maria from Lost In A Spotless Mind. It was while looking back at photos from my Blair Waldorf from season 1 eyebrow phase that I realised that you need to take the entire face into account when shaping eyebrows -- the face shape, shape of the eyes, the cheeks. Blair's dainty arches were pretty by themselves but they threw my whole face off-balance. I remember that my mother told me when I was a teenager that thin eyebrows don't suit me at all because they make my face look bottom-heavy.
Anyway, I finally needed some kind of brow expert to do my eyebrows. Someone suggested the Benefit Brow Bar, and when I googled reviews it sounded good. I decided that if I'm going to get my brows shaped there, I'm going to do it properly. Which meant growing out my eyebrows. This made me nervous because I haven't seen the unplucked shape of my arches since I was 14. It took weeks, and made me really thankful for my bangs. I have to confess that I did pluck between my brows. Then me and my grown-out brows went to the local Douglas, which is where the Benefit Brow Bars here are.
I actually made several passes around the Benefit stand first, and then timidly chatted up the salesgirl, trying to see what the stylist's own eyebrows looked like. I liked them, so I asked for a brow session. I mentioned that I don't want my brows to look too thin. The whole procedure took around 15 minutes and was done with wax, with small corrections were done with tweezers. I was happy that she didn't use scissors because in my opinion snipped eyebrow hair give a touch of stiffness and fakeness to the brows. At the end she used a brow mascara. I didn't opt for a dye because my brows are dark already.
The stylist showed me the way my brows were asymmetrical and how she was working with that, which was extremely helpful. She didn't change the shape of my brows much, however she
What really surprised me about waxing is the really clean effect. I realised that waxing removes even the tiny hair that I don't bother with when I pluck, and this makes the eyebrows look sharper -- as if I had used concealer on the area.
Here are the results:
As you can see the general shape is cleaned up, the tail of the longer brow was shortened, and the peak of the left brow was removed and the lower line of the right arch was made to match the left. The space between the brows was lightly widened.
My only criticism is that at the end the lady asked me if she should cover up the skin that war red from plucking with concealer. I said yes, so she proceeded to apply what under the strong light looked like a normal amount of concealer. Outside in daylight it looked as if it were applied with a shovel.
The upkeep:
I am maintaining my brows at home because I have neither the time nor the budget to get regular waxes. Also I can't imagine letting the hair grow out between sessions. So I tweeze.
Getting my brows professionally done has been amazing, after several months I still love the shape and it works really well with the rest of my face.
If you have been thinking about getting your brows done at the Benefit Brow Bar, In my opinion it's well worth the investment. It's pretty important to get a good photo of your brows after the session. I though it would be enough to just pluck out the hair that grew back, but after a while I noticed that I had strayed away from the shape I got at Benefit. The photos I took help me to get the right shape again. I also made my own stencil, which is a fun little project. If you would you like to see a post about that, let me know.
