A Question from a Follower about Eyebrows:
Hi Carol,
I need some makeup advice. I am a 65 year old African-American woman whose naturally thin eyebrows are leaving me at a rapid pace. Partly due to age, waxing, plucking over the years, I guess. I use an inexpensive dark brown eyeliner pencil. I find black too harsh.
Do you recommend another product and brush? The eyebrows in your photos are amazing!! A friend of mine once tried to make my brows look thicker, but I ended up looking like Joan Crawford. LOL
Thanks for your expertise.
Dannette
Hi Dannette –
Thanks for your question! If it’s OK with you, I’d like to share it with my other readers, because eyebrows are a tricky issue for many women. Eyebrows do tend to thin out with age, as well as from various hormone conditions. Thyroid imbalances cause the outer half of eyebrows to completely disappear. And ironically, lips and eyebrows are the best features for women over 50 to accent, because it seems to give us the best boost when it comes to jazzing up our appearance. So it makes a world of difference when you learn to do them well. I plucked mine very badly when I was 12 years old, and they never came back properly. So I learned to become an ‘eyebrow expert’!
Here’s the best way to classy but believable eyebrows:
1. Find 2 colors of brow product to work with – one the same color as your natural brows, and the other several shades lighter. The lighter one can be a pencil, or a brush-on powder product like an eyeshadow. The darker one should be an eye pencil that you can create a thin line with. If you choose a shadow or powder for the lighter product, your tool should be either a diagonal stiff brush, or a small cone-shaped sponge-tip eyeshadow blender. Either one works great.
2. Start with the lighter color. This will create most of your new brow shape by filling in any empty spots and adding length if brows are too short on either end. Stroke on gently and extend each end of both brows to their proper length. Remember the “pencil trick”? To check for proper length (or where brows should start and stop), line up a pencil or stick alongside your nose and the inside corner of your eye, and let it lay it along your face all the way up to the inside edge of your eyebrow. The beginning of your eyebrow should line up with the corner of your eye. You can draw a dot right there with pencil to mark where you should begin making up your brow. To check where the brow stops, swing the top of the pencil over so it now makes an imaginary line from your nose to the outside corner of your eye. If you continue the imaginary line from the pencil all the way up to where your eyebrow grows, that shows you where your brow should stop. Draw another dot at that point. The highest peak of the brow should line up with the outside edge of the iris, the colored part of your eye. Rather than being exactly at midpoint in the brow, the peak will always be about 2/3 of the way over. This exercise gives you the perfect natural geometry for your best brow shape.
3. Brows should be thicker where they start (at the inside corner of your eyes) and thinner where they stop (at the outer corner of your eyes). The direction you draw them in matters too – draw with vertical strokes at the inside corner where brows start, and then gradually start to “lean over” with your strokes. If you notice, this is the natural growth direction of your real eyebrow hairs. Make your strokes match what the real hairs are doing. As you move farther out on the brow, the hairs start to lay down sideways, and then finally tilt downward. Make your drawn strokes do the exact same thing.
4. To finish it off – take your darker color pencil and add a few spare strokes here and there along the whole brow. Draw them as if you were drawing little duplicate hairs – because you are! These darker strokes make the brow look so much more real, and give it dimension. This is the “killer secret” to fantastic looking brows, and most women never do this last step. For most of my dark skinned clients, I can use a medium brown base brow color with dark brown or even black as the accent color. It just depends on the depth of your skin tone, and how thick you hair is on your head. If you have a lot of hair, you can take more hair in the brows.
Don’t get discouraged – give yourself some time to practice,
and I promise you – after a week, you will be almost an expert. Experiment with different thicknesses and product colors until you find what you love best. It took me quite a while to get the look for myself that I was really happy with. And brows change with fashion, so remember to do a fashion check-up every few years.
And give yourself a fantastic bright lipstick to go with your gorgeous new brows!
If you do careful lipliner on your lips, then a fabulous color will look absolutely amazing! And it will fit perfectly with your beautifully shaped eyebrows. It all fits together.
Enjoy learning your new skill and share this tip with your friends. Thanks for your question and stay gorgeous!
Warm regards,
Carol