Looking Good

Eyebrows are tricky creatures. You know how they’re supposed
to look, but sometimes they don’t want to cooperate, and
because they’re growing out of your head, they have a semi
permanent character that defies wishes and good intentions.

One of the many problems of eyebrows is the fact that if
they aren’t the right color, they can either dominate your
face or disappear entirely. Their unfortunate (but necessary)
proximity to your eyeballs makes it a pretty major no-no to
just sweep the haircolor across each brow and hope it doesn’t
drip into your eyes. That’s why the goddess of practical
beauty created the eyebrow pencil, an unsatisfactory solution,
but sometimes better than nothing if your eyebrows happen to
be very pale.

Shaping Your Eyebrows: How to get the perfect arch shape
Shape is also crucial, and if your eyebrows are coarse,
creating and maintaining the ideal shape is difficult
because pulling out individual hairs can leave large gaps,
or severely shorten the length of a brow if you happen to
pull out the half-inch hair on the very end.

The perfect eyebrow starts above the inside corner of your
eye (over the tear duct), and ends at the outside corner,
above your eyelashes. Eyebrows should have an arch: in nature,
it’s rarely where it should be, which is a frustrating
commentary on standards of beauty. Ideally, the arch happens
over the iris, the colored part of your eye. It should be
gentle, so if you’re planning to reshape your arch, take it
very, very slowly. Do a hair or two a day, and err on the
side of caution. Hasty plucking can give you a surprised look
that lasts for weeks.

How to Pluck Eyebrows with Tweezers: The Do’s and Don’ts
Many women pluck their eyebrows with tweezers. Some wax them,
but wax is tricky because it’s hard to get an accurate shape.
And some go to a hair removal salon to try “threading.”
Although threading is newly popular in the United States, it
is a centuries-old technique of hair removal practiced in
India. The eyebrow experts say never, never to pluck your
eyebrows from above, but always to pluck from the bottom of
the brow. I say, if you have some wild or stray or bushy
hairs growing above your brows, feel free to pluck them. I
did it once, and nothing bad happened to me.

I read somewhere that it’s okay to trim your eyebrows. I think
this is good if the single hairs are long and thick. You can
pluck some hairs and trim the others, brushing them up,
evening the ends (be careful not to trim too much!), then
brushing them down checking again and again as you go along.

Use Eyebrow Gel to Keep Your Brow Shape Neat after Tweezing
Finally, keeping your brows neat can be done with special
eyebrow gel, or you can use a little hair gel to smooth them
and keep them shapely.