Brow make-up – a natural look for the office

One of the challenges of losing your hair – whether through alopecia, cancer treatment or other reasons – is that in many cases you may lose your brows and lashes too. Over the years I’ve tried various sorts of make-up in an attempt to look ‘normal’ without looking heavily made-up. My holy grail is to look as though I’m wearing nothing more than a slick of mascara and everything else is 100% natural, but that’s never going to be achievable. I see my fake brows and lashes as an ongoing – and rather fun – evolution, and thought I’d share my current approach to doing my eyebrows with you all.

There are more and more great new brow products coming on to the market, and I hope to try some of the new options soon. In the meantime I’ve been evolving my use of brow make-up. The great news is that the current fashion is for strong, enhanced brows, so there’s no need to try to make them look unenhanced if you don’t want to. Michelle rocks this stronger look brilliantly and looks amazing. There are lots of tutorials out there so I won’t try to replicate them, especially as sadly this look doesn’t suit me. Instead I’ve been working on trying to fake a softer unenhanced look.

Over the years I’ve used various pencils, powders and waxes but have never been very good at making them look natural. However the advent of YouTube makeup tutorials is a real boon for us bare-faced ladies, and I learned a great technique a year or two ago. Sadly I can’t find that video any more or I’d share a link – let me know if you’d like me to do a video for you all to show you. You don’t need hugely expensive products for this – a basic brow powder, a short stiff brush, and a basic eye pencil are all you need.

Here are the key steps:

1. I’m starting with no brow make-up, but foundation/powder already done.
2. Using a medium-to-dark brow powder and a short stiff brush, sketch in your brow arch. The shaping and edges don’t have to be perfect; you’ll use this as the base to add ‘hairs’.
3. Get an eyebrow pencil and sharpen it really really sharp.
4. Use your very sharp eyebrow pencil to draw in fine lines, imitating hairs. You don’t have to draw as many lines as a real eyebrow would have actual hairs, the aim is to give the sense of a slightly messy natural brow.
5. Be a bit brave and take the fine lines a bit higher than you think they should be – remember they’re fine lines not a solid block of colour so they won’t make your brows look enormous. Also remember that real brow hairs tend to curve so try to relax your hand as you draw them and let the lines curve over at the top rather than being poker straight.
6. If the lines start to get a bit thicker, sharpen your pencil again! You’ll certainly need to re-sharpen before doing your second brow, and possibly in between too. It feels wasteful, but you don’t need spend a fortune on top branded pencils and they still last for ages even with all this sharpening.

A couple of other tips . . .

Natural brows are less dense nearer your nose so if you can apply a lighter touch there that helps. I’m not brilliant at doing that though! Also, you should try to have a few vertical lines in that area – again, when you look closely at natural brows you’ll often find the hairs grow in a slightly different direction here.
And if you don’t know how to shape your brows, this visual guide on where to start, arch and finish them might help – just use a pencil to figure out where the end of each line should be and mark with a dot to guide you.
          (a) Start,  (b), Arch,  (c) Finish

As always, Let me know your thoughts in the comments below,

Love from,
Lizzie xx