Tweezing: Best Practices for Keeping Your Brows in Shape at Home
While at home, maintaining your beauty routine is important, and that includes showing your eyebrows some extra TLC! Until you can get back into one of our salons for a brow refresh, learn how you can keep them looking groomed and in shape with tweezing and also keep them strengthened and conditioned.
Your Essential Brow Toolkit for Tweezing
To ensure your brow beauty routine is a success, make sure you have each of the following items on hand:
Tweezers: Slanted-tip tweezers will be your best friend because they allow you to better grasp the root of your brow hair.
Mascara Wand: A clean mascara wand is perfect for giving your lashes a fluff each day, but did you know it’s also great for brushing your brows?
Mirror: Avoiding small, magnified mirrors is key. Why? Because these mirrors don’t allow you to see both of your eyebrows at the same time. Use a larger mirror instead to sculpt the shape of both brows evenly, preventing over-tweezing.
Determining Your Natural Eyebrow Shape
Before diving into your DIY brow game, it’s a good idea to determine your natural brow shape to see how much hair you need to tweeze and to ensure that you don’t over-tweeze (some of us remember the 2000s…).
We recommend using the “golden ratio” to create the perfect brow shape to complement your facial features. The Golden Ratio Rule is a rule of thumb used to determine a person’s best eyebrow shape for their facial and bone structure. There are three guidelines used to determine this and the beautiful balance and symmetry between the person’s face and their eyebrows.
How to Use The Golden Ratio to Determine Your Brow Shape
Step 1: Hold an eyebrow pencil vertically on your nose (this will be where the nostril attaches to the tip of the nose) so that the tool is going upwards, past the brow bone. Mark the spot. This will be the starting point for that individual brow, and you will want to do this process for each one.
Step 2: Take the eyebrow pencil and place on the tip of the nose. Angle your tool diagonally so that it lines up through your pupil to the brow bone. This will be the highest point of the brow’s arch. Mark the spot. Complete on each eye.
Step 3: The last step will be moving your brow pencil to the outer nostril and angle diagonally to cross through the outer corner of each eye. This will mark the end of the brow.
Eyebrow Tweezing 101
Let’s talk tweezing! Since each brow hair is attached to a tiny blood vessel, it’s always a good idea to make sure you tweeze in the direction of the hair growth. This will ease inflammation and help prevent the vessel from rupturing or scarring. Tweezing properly also includes using firm slow strokes, up and out and away from you face.
Tweezing Tips + How Not to Over-Tweeze
Remember the golden rule of tweezing your eyebrows? That’s right, it’s to remove ONLY the smallest amount of hair you can. You can always remove more hair, but you can’t put them back!
The shape of the brow is usually formed when removing hairs at the top of the eyebrow, so minimum tweezing is the key. To help you resist the urge to over-tweeze, we recommend two things: Outline your brows and set a timeframe.
1. Always Outline Your Brows Before Tweezing
After marking your starting points using the golden ratio, you will then want to outline the top and bottom of your brows with a brow liner. When it comes to outlining, how thick a brow is from top to bottom is a personal choice and whatever is on the OUTSIDE of the line, is the area you will want to remove.
The outlined areas will serve as a stencil so you can better see what hairs should be removed and which ones should stay. Next, outline the top of the brow and remove the hairs above that area. Lastly, outline underneath the bottom of the brow and remove the hairs under that line.
2. When You Tweeze, a Set Timeframe Is Your Friend!
Try to set a time limit for yourself when it comes to grooming your brows. This will help so that you don’t overthink—or overstress—plucking. It will also save you from over-tweezing. We recommend a 15-minute timeframe, once a week.
Growth, Strengthening and Conditioning: Investing in Your Brows
Just like investing and maintaining healthy hair and lashes, you can invest a little extra time and care into your brows, too. If your brows are sparse or are just not as full as you would like them to be, there are things you can do to help them grow, be strengthened and conditioned.
While you’re social distancing, now is the perfect opportunity to grow out those sparse brows! If you need some help in the growth department, give a growth serum product for your brows a try! Here at The Lash Lounge, we love neuBROW PROFESSIONAL™ serum because it strengthens, revitalizes and conditions your natural eyebrows. It doesn’t require a prescription and—the best part—you should see fuller-looking, more defined brows in as little as 4 weeks!
Another way to condition your brows is to apply natural oils such and castor oil or coconut oil.* When applying, either nighttime or before bed is best time.
*Recommended product usage should be discussed and cleared by a medical professional.
Brow Services Resumed
The Lash Lounge loves to take the extra work off your hands and give your beautiful brows a boost. From eyebrow threading to a brow tint, check in with your local salon* for information regarding reopening. We would love for you to come in and let us take over. Your brows WILL thank you!
*Services vary by location.
