Brows frame a face more than any other feature, and they are the easiest thing to ruin, because a mistake takes months rather than minutes to undo.

Find your line before touching anything

Three reference points, measured with a pencil held against your face:

The start. Vertically up from the outer edge of your nostril. Brows that start further apart than this make the face look wider.

The arch. From the nostril through the outer edge of the iris. Not the middle of the brow — arching too centrally is what produces a surprised expression.

The end. From the nostril through the outer corner of the eye. Anything past this drags the eye downward.

Mark all three before you remove a single hair.

Removing hair

  • In daylight, and never with a magnifying mirror — it makes you remove far more than you should
  • Below the brow only. The top edge is what gives a brow its shape. Almost every over-plucked brow was thinned from above
  • A few hairs, then step back. Look at the whole face, not the brow in isolation
  • Stop earlier than feels finished. Brows look fuller in a mirror at close range than they do to anyone else

Filling them in

Light strokes in the direction the hair grows, concentrated where the brow is sparse. Then brush through with a spoolie — this softens everything and is the step that separates natural brows from drawn ones.

Keep the front of the brow lightest. Density at the inner edge is what reads as artificial.

Shade one step lighter than your hair for dark hair, one step darker for fair hair.

The three mistakes

Over-plucking. The most common and the slowest to fix. Brow hair does not always grow back after years of removal.

Matching the two brows exactly. They are sisters, not twins — a well-known phrase and a true one. Chasing symmetry is how people end up with two thin brows.

Too much product. If the brows are the first thing you notice in a photograph, there is too much on them.

Growing them back

If they have been over-plucked, the only remedy is leaving them alone entirely for three months. No tidying. Fill them in with product meanwhile, and resist the urge to neaten the strays — those strays are the recovery.

More technique in the makeup section.