For Dana, eyelashes are her important thing to make the eyes pop.  For me, I’m obsessed with eyebrows. It’s one of the first things I notice on people – over-tweezed, under-tweezed, wrong shape, not groomed, too short, misplaced arch.  OK you get the picture what I’m talking about here. To me, brows matter – big time. Not only can they open up the eyes and face, but if eyebrow shaping is done incorrectly they can also drag down the face and eyes.  When we’re over 40 the brows tend to gravitate downward and many of us have loose extra skin that is right under the eyebrow that can make our eyes appear more closed off.  So there are a lot of factors to consider just making the eyes appear more open and youthful.

Last month I spent a long weekend with some girlfriends and of course they were picking my brain on beauty advice. Besides making sure everyone was using the correct shade of foundation and teaching how to use a highlighter, eyebrows seemed to be the most dramatic face changers.  One friend, her brows just needed to be extended inward – the tweezing began too far out making the gap between the brows in the center of the face too wide.  I showed her how to close that gap in with a brow pencil till the hairs grew in, if they could grow back in at all. But another friend needed some additional changes to her brows that I couldn’t do – I didn’t want to do dramatic changes with a tweezers since I’m not a professional brow groomer. I could tell her what needed to be done for her eyebrow shaping, I just didn’t want to do it since I’ve never groomed someones brows on anyone else.  I wanted to leave hers to the pros – so the next day when we went shopping we stopped at the Macy’s on Michigan Avenue at the Benefit Brow Bar.

My friend said I could take photos of what they did, but I HAD to put the disclaimer out there that she had NO MAKEUP ON – because our next stop was going to be to get the perfect match foundation.  But first the brows…

Unfortunately I didn’t get a complete “before” shot as they had already begun when I got over to them.  But, as common with so many women, you can see her brow hairs are very light on the outer frame making it appear to be nearly no brows, when in actuality, she has several hairs there and they were quite thick, but not full. So the goal was to make the brows appear to balance out from inner to outer edges, give them the correct shape and shade them to show up more.

First the brow stylist made markings where her brow should start, arch and end.

These two images show how the stylist created a brow “template” on her face.  While this may look dramatic and harsh, it’s not how the end result looks.  This creates a guide to be able to wax and tweeze the hairs that are not within the “template”.

Here she is getting the hairs outside the template area waxed.

She then cut the length of the hairs that were within the template area so they weren’t too long and unruly.  After this she removed the drawn on brows.

Now that the correct brow shape is in place, she filled the brows in with an eyebrow powder for her hair tone, using an angled brush.

Here’s the finished look – without any other makeup, yet.  What a big difference this makes, and they look natural and full. Since Benefit Brow Bar does not do brow tinting, she said she would have that done when she returned home.

With brow stylist

Here’s a photo later in the day after the rest of her makeup was applied.  She looks great!