How to groom your own eyebrows – a guide for men.
Eyebrows
by Dil | on July 11th, 2010 |
Well groomed eyebrows can really enhance your appearance…
When it comes to grooming eyebrows, my main goal is to have them look natural and for them to require the minimum amount of upkeep. When grooming men’s brows, I think it’s important to clean up and enhance what you already have instead of trying to carve out a completely new shape for them. A lot of how-tos I see online make brows look unnaturally shaped, unnaturally clean and would be a nightmare to maintain on a day-to-day basis.
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| Perfectly arched brows? Not the most masculine look. |
So, what are my ground rules when it comes to grooming brows?
- Keep it simple: Not everybody needs a lot of brow grooming, I like to keep it to the bare minimum where possible.
- Avoid excessive maintenance: Unless you’re an obsessive brow groomer, you’re going to have periods of regrowth where any hairs you remove from your brows grows back – just like beard stubble. Even if you pluck them everyday, there will still be a point at which they are large enough to see but too small to pluck. This is why it’s important to minimise the amount of plucked hairs – so you don’t have swathes of ‘eyebrow shadow’ where you plucked them.
- Never arch: The arch of your eyebrows is the part that arcs up a bit on the underside of your brows. A clean eyebrow arch can look very feminine and artificial, leaving that area untouched is a key part of making groomed brows look masculine and natural. This is also the place where eyebrow plucking is the most obvious once the hairs begin to regrow, most men that pluck/wax this area are prone to that ‘eyebrow shadow’ I mentioned before.
- No need to be perfect: Don’t obsess over making every part of your eyebrows even, clean and straight. Make sure they’re neat and not lopsided and leave it at that. If you obsess over making them even and super-neat, that’s when you’ll end up over-plucking and making a mess of your eyebrows. Natural brows are never neat and they’re never completely identical either.
- Enhance, don’t re-shape: Unless your brows are at a Groucho-Marx level of bushiness, try to simply enhance the natural shape of your brows instead of making them conform to a specific shape you have in mind. This will give you the most natural results.
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| Don’t let it happen to you! |
I’ll be showing you how to do this. You can either stop at the second picture or progress to the third.
You will need:
- Baby powder
- A pen, because a little pen on your face is miles better than having a fucked up pair of eyebrows.
- A pair of good tweezers (Tweerman make the best ones by far, they’re worth investing in).
- Brow scissors (a pair of small scissors with a curve in the blades)
- A toothbrush
Tutorial
Rub a tiny bit of powder into your brows and on your forehead. This removes any excess grease or oil which makes it easier to pluck and trim hairs.
Grab your pen and draw a set of parallel vertical lines between your eyebrows, this is where you’ll be plucking away your unibrow. These lines should hit either side of the bridge of your nose. If your brows are spaced further apart, simply draw on two vertical lines so that they’re an equal distance apart, try to keep them close together.
Next draw a pair of parallel horizontal lines on the inner part of your brows. One should be at the top and one should be at the bottom. These lines should match up to the width of the rest of your eyebrows. Notice how on the diagram they line up with the dense part of the rest of the brow? This leaves the excess hair outside the lines.
At this point you should have a noughts and crosses (or tick tack toe) pattern drawn on. The curved edges i’ve drawn on just shows where you’ll round out the edges of your brows to make them look less square.
Now we can move on to hair removal!
The purple indicates places where you will trim.
The green indicates places where you will pluck.
First, use the toothbrush to brush your brows upwards and then trim off any of the longer hairs straight across. On the diagram that means trim all the purple above the eyebrows apart from the tiny curved bits in the corner, they’ll come later.
Next, take your tweezers and begin to pluck out all of the unwanted hair. Stick within the lines! Make sure to get that area underneath the brows i’ve highlighted if there’s any hair there – it’ll make a huge difference.
Finally use the curved edge of your brow scissors and just trim the very tips of the brow corners in a slight curve to get rid of the harsh rectangle shape. This is potentially the trickiest bit, just remember you’re only trimming off a tiny bit to get rid of the sharp corner in that area.
Now you’re done! The unibrow is gone, the longer hairs at the top have been trimmed and see how plucking that small area underneath the brows has opened up the eyes?
If you want to go for a cleaner, more defined look, you can then move onto the next step:
This section is a part of the brow that’s less dense and grows downwards instead of up. It’s easy to identify it just by sight and it’s the bit we want to take off completely.Removing this part takes a lot of skill to make sure you don’t end up with a wonky line. This is where it would be best to get a professional to take over. Go to an eyebrow waxer or preferably threader (they yank out lines of hair at a time, making it very precise) and tell them you only want this area removed. No eyebrow arching!If you want to try doing this step yourself, i suggest first trimming the hairs down very short with a hair trimmer. Place the head of the trimmer above and parallel to your brows and then move it downwards to trim off the excess hair in a straight line. Then take out your tweezers and pluck out all the hairs you trimmed down.That should leave you with this! It’s clean, well groomed and yet still natural looking.
So, lets go through it all once more (because i’m enjoying the animated gifs way too much):
Aftercare
- Swipe your brows with a salicylic (or BHA) solution to prevent ingrowns and to soothe irritation. Don’t apply any moisturiser to the area for 24 hours. If you must, you can smooth on a bit of aloe vera gel to calm down the area.
- To keep your brows looking sleek, try running a bit of clear brow gel through them or use a matte wax instead. You can take a tiny bit of your hair wax through them or use my favourite Givenchy Mister Eyebrow Fixing Pencil which is a clear brow wax in pencil form.
- As for upkeep, if you do it regularly enough you can avoid ever having to visit this tutorial again! If you ever find that you’ve overplucked whilst maintaining your eyebrows, wait for them to grow and then draw out the guidelines in the future until you get the hang of it.
And that’s it, a guide on how to groom your brows at home! Obviously not all brows are the same but hopefully that’ll give you a good idea on where to start and you can adapt the guide for your own needs. If you’re really stuck, send me a picture of your eyebrows and I’ll draw a guide onto them – I only ask that you allow me to share the picture with everyone else on SCforM (anonymously, of course).
Hope that helped, happy plucking!
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Comments (15)
Have you ever explored threading or waxing for monobrows? Your brows are naturally nice and don't need mowing!
I must show this to my brother! He desperately needs some tidying up (as do i)
@ Yin - I ended up finding a stock photo since all the others weren't close enough to the eyebrows! They're not mine.
@ Connie De Alwis - Thanks for reading, i'm glad it helped!
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[...] point of your face and this is amplified when you’re wearing glasses. Make sure your brows are well groomed and run a brow comb through them before you leave the door – it’ll make the world of [...]
[...] point of your face and this is amplified when you’re wearing glasses. Make sure your brows are well groomed and run a brow comb through them before you leave the door – it’ll make the world of [...]