Shaping My Eyebrows

Today, I set out on a mission to shape my eyebrows. After reading Yelp reviews on the best eyebrow shaper in the city who uses solely tweezers, I figured I could do it myself. After two hours of video watching, tweezing, drawing, removing said drawing, redrawing, photos, photoshopping photos, and retweezing with more redrawing, I am really, really pleased with my results. In the past when I have tried to shape my own brows I have always ended up with that 'ugh' moment where I went too far to create any sort of shape. Not so much, this time. Apparently, that's how much it works it takes when you're not an expert on these things and creating the process for yourself. At least for me. But see for yourself in the end product.

First, I found this video on shaping your eyebrows like a celebrity from Bobbe Joy, celebrity esthetician.

Perfect for me, because it outlined all the tools I'd need, as well as how to use them. Only, I didn't have all the tools. So I improvised. You don't have to use the tools I improvised with, I only show them to show they can be improvised with hopefully fancier tools than mine.

I used Shadowbox's midnight brown (the bottom right color) cream eyeliner from their Brow Tech & Cream Eye Liner Palette for my eyebrow pencil,

with a Sephora angled brow/liner brush,

scissors with tiny pointy ends and straight edges from Costco (the smallest ones below),

and my favorite Revlon slant tip tweezers that have served me well for years.

Next, I went to work drawing the straight, parallel lines and the sloping triangle like she talked about. Unfortunately, I don't have the best before shot of my unruly brows that I had let grow out since my last wax two weeks ago that left me $30 more broke, completely broken out, and slightly disappointed in the results. This shot is from a video I took yesterday via Photo Booth, thus the poor quality and awkward position.

After drawing and redrawing several times, I was satisified with the results, but not completely happy. They looked slightly uneven and I didn't know how to fix it. And, no, I had no makeup on. Thank goodness for Aperture's skin smoothing tool to somewhat save the day.

A little more web searching brought me to this awesome site from Veet where you can upload a photo of yourself and try out different eyebrows. It took me two tries to get the eyebrow placement just right to where it covered up my eyebrows but left my eyes open. Out of all the eyebrows, I was happiest with number fifteen best. Even though the photo looks crazy ridiculous and kinda scary with how dark the eyebrows are and way too small for my face, it still gave me a sense of what shape works with my face and opens up my eyes. Number fifteen seemed to fit my natural arch and open up my eyes without me looking surprised (you can see how bad my skin really is right now in this photo mostly from said botched waxing job two weeks ago- I couldn't believe how high up she went on my forehead even after I told her I was sensitive. Unfortunately, I'm over uploading it to smooth out the skin with Aperture right now).

Once I found the brows I liked I saved the photo and analyzed why I liked it more than the shaping I had just done on my eyebrows. Turns out, I liked the evenness of the two. I realized I needed to thin the part closest to my inner brow on my right eyebrow just a bit more. Just to make sure I wasn't going off a crazy I couldn't look like that any way photo, I uploaded my own photo to Aperture and photoshopped the tweezing I was thinking of doing.

Seemed to look good in the photoshopped version on me, so I went ahead and redrew my parallel lines and went to work. Ta-dah! The unphotoshopped version,

except for that face saving skin smoothing. I am SO happy with the results! And I am out no money to boot. Quite a process, but at least now I have it written down so I can do it again.

Here is the after shaping but before refining photo on the left, and the after refining photo on the right so the difference is more obvious.

So, they're still not perfect. I am happy with them, though, and even happier to not show up looking like Chewbacca at an event this Saturday.

For the record, I'm not really sure if *ANY*one cares about this but me, but I wanted to document the process for next time I want to do this! Oh, and the final result is without any filling in with brow powder, which I normally do. They'll look even better with that, but I've always been a fan of making sure my eyebrows look good without any kind of fill in powder or pencil first.

Update: Here are two before photos with filled in brows. I'm almost embarrassed to show the second one, but oh well, after seeing a fantabulous ugly faces post I'm pretty sure I won't be embarrassed about posting ugly faces photos from now on ;) .

And here is a filled in after photo from tonight (also, totally found a new way to do my hair - this is a result of taking out a combination of the sock bun and top knot at the end of the night after only having it in three hours - LOVE it):

And a side by side before, after, and before photo (just so you can compare the after to each before). Love how it makes my eyes look even again. For awhile there, my eyes looked all wonky! I thought it was me, but I guess it was more the eyebrows. Even Brando loves them. He says they look all symmetrical and he loooves symmetry ;) .