Carla GS with her latest beauty toy: the Brow Buddy. Lipstick note: Revlon Super Lustrous Lipstick in Certainly Red, $21.95. Source: Supplied.
In the basket of “ultra-difficult DIY beauty treatments” is shaping your own brows. Trust me on this. Before starting my job as beauty editor of The Glow, I panicked and used nail scissors to cut my brow hairs until they were really short. It was a gigantic disaster, and I’ve been growing my brows out ever since.
Enter: The Brow Buddy Kit by Billion Dollar Brows, $29.00, a brow-shaping tool which is newly available at Mecca Cosmetica. It’s a plastic contraption which guides you in designing the perfect shape for your eyebrows from the start, to the arch, to the tail.
It’s kind of like a ruler, or a set-square, for your brows. By using the plastic “arms” of this tool to align parts of your eyebrows to your nose and eyes, you can ideally create gorgeously symmetrical eyebrows. It’s enough to make Cara Delevingne jealous.
Before Brow Buddy.
Here's my eyebrows in their natural state. I've used a tinted brow wax to fill in a few bald patches, as well as a clear gel to groom everything into place. But apart from that, I've just let my eyebrows grow out into their natural shape.
Step 1. Finding your start.
The Brow Buddy Kit comes equipped with a white pencil, detailed instructions and the Brow Buddy tool itself. The first step required me to place the Brow Buddy flat against my face, in the closed position, with my nose in the centre.
"This is where your brow will START," the instructions read. I then had to draw a thin, white line on the inside of the tool, to indicate where my new life brows would start.
Step 2. Finding your arch.
The next step involved looking straight ahead, and extending the "prongs" until they lined up with the outside corner of my irises (the coloured bit of my eyes).
This was harder than it looked, and I was worried I would stuff it up. What is this - face geometry? Once everything was aligned, I had to draw more lines on my eyebrows to indicate where my arches would be situated.
Step 3. Finding your end.
This time, I extended the Brow Buddy prongs to line up with the outer corner of my eyes. "This is where your brow will END," intoned the instructions with finality. Again, I drew a white line on the inside of the prongs.
Almost there...
Halfway through the process, this is what I looked like. I was surprised to find that my natural eyebrows were... well, "wrong". My left eyebrow "started" too close to my nose, while my right eyebrow was bald where it was supposed to start. I also realised that my eyebrows actually had nothing resembling an arch.
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The biggest change suggested by the Brow Buddy was that my eyebrows didn't "end" in the "right" spot - in fact, both of the tails were too long. By aligning the Brow Buddy with the outer corners of my eyes, I was cutting off the ends of my eyebrows. Personally, I think that chopping off the tails of my eyebrows would be unflattering.
Interestingly, I tested out the Brow Buddy on other girls in the office, aligning it with the corners of their eyes. The women who were Caucasian had their eyebrows end at the "right" place, according to the Brow Buddy. However, the women of non-Caucasian ethnicity also had their eyebrows chopped off, just like me.
Although the Brow Buddy is supposed to create a customised brow shape for every woman, I think it's best suited to Caucasian women.
Steps 4 and 5: Establishing the bottom and top of your brows.
Next up, I was instructed to follow my "natural brow line" and draw lines to connect the "start, arch and end points" on the bottoms and tops of my brows. This outline was to be used as a guide for tweezing, as well as applying brow makeup.
I plucked everywhere I was told to, except for the tails of my brows. I liked them at their natural length, so I just used a ton of concealer to cover them for this experiment.
After Brow Buddy.
Aaaaaaand here's my new eyebrow look! It's a lot more dramatic and defined than my natural brows, with a more exaggerated arch. The brows are shorter and chunkier. It's the Danny DeVito brow effect. It's an interesting new brow style, but personally, I prefer my natural brow shape in all their jelly-snake-shaped glory.
I sat at my desk, feeling like a bit strange with my big eyebrows, only to have my fellow Glowies, Eddie and Kahla, compliment me on my new look. They loved my new eyebrow shape, which was a huge compliment, especially as they have four of the best eyebrows I've ever seen.
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All up, the whole Brow Buddy process took me about 30 minutes. With only a few changes here and there, my eyebrows - and therefore, face - looked very different. Using the Brow Buddy was helpful in guiding me where to pluck my eyebrows, and it was definitely better than hacking at them randomly with scissors.
But just remember, the best kind of eyebrow shape is one you're comfortable with - whether that's natural, or enhanced.
Have you had your eyebrows professionally shaped? Or do you have some DIY brow shaping tricks to share?
