How to Shape Your Brows

 Eye brows frame your eyes.  They are very important.  Yet shaping your brows is extremely difficult.  I have read countless articles and forum posts about what NOT to do.  We naturally notice, and comment on, poorly shaped brows.  But how the heck do we get our brows off the DON'T list?

Here is everything I learned about eye brows in my quest to tame my own bushy brows.

To determine where your brows should begin and end, as well as where they should arch, you will need a chopstick, or pencil, or straw.  To determine the START of your brow, hold up your chopstick from the bottom edge of your nose to the inner corner of your eye.  Your brow should start where the chopstick touches transects your brow.  Similarly, hold the chopstick from the edge of your nose to the outer edge of your eye, to determine the END of your brow.  Use your chopstick to indicate your brow's ARCH by holding it from the edge of your nose to the middle of your iris.

When shaping your brows, the most important thing to remember is that the part of the brow before the arch should be one thick line.  That is, if you draw a line at the bottom of your brow, and another line at the top of the brow, those two lines should be parallel.  Since my brows are quite thick and bushy, I use brow scissors to trim the top of the brow to give me that straight shape.  A common mistake is to over-pluck the bottom area in an attempt to emphasize the arch.  This leads to the 'comma brow', where you get a bulb at the inner end, and then a thin brow from there.  I sported one of these for quite some time.

Past the arch, your brow should taper.  It's best to just follow your brow shape here.  I usually don't mess with this part of my brow.

Also remember these brow shape guidelines when you're filling in your brows.  Sometimes our brows just don't grow all the way to where they should on the ends.  So use a pencil or an eye shadow that matches your brow color or is slightly lighter, to lightly feather in any sparse areas.

Accept your brows for what they are.  Some people have naturally high arching brows, others don't.  I have almost no arch to my brows.  And the more I tried to fight that shape, and the more I tried to give myself an arch, the worse my brows looked.  About a year ago, I stopped fighting it, and went with the flow.  It took forever for my brows to grow out.  But I'm so much happier with their shape now.

We hear this over and over.  And yet we still are tempted to make this number one brow mistake. We pluck and we pluck.  STOP!  Don't do it!  Step away from the tweezers.

I was recently watching GossMakeupArtist on youtube talk about the way we unnecessarily age ourselves.  Over-plucking was near the top of his list.  He also made a very good point I never considered before:

 Ever notice that the princess has nice full brows, and the evil queen has over-arched, super thin brows?  

So next time you're shaping your brows, remember that you're the princess, and not the evil queen!

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