Valerie’s Brow Recovery Diary: Follow One STELLAR Writer On Her Journey From Brow-Less To Flawless

Up until last week, I had somehow made it to my 28th year of life without ever having my eyebrows done by a professional. I know! I write about beauty for a living! But it had just never occurred to me. I first plucked them at around 12 years of age after becoming paranoid that I had a unibrow (unconscionable for a 12-year-old suddenly aware of her facial features). But after I plucked the ‘unibrow’, I became paranoid that my eyebrows resembled thick, black caterpillars on my forehead, so I plucked them too.

Now, sixteen years on, I don’t pluck them at all, because they don’t grow. If new hairs do appear, they grow in odd directions – mostly straight out of my head, like an arrow. Still, when I filled them in they looked reasonably okay, so I didn’t think about them much. My brows and lashes are naturally black (as is my moustache – you can’t win ’em all) and I didn’t have to spend the day drawing them on. They’d do.

But then I saw a few before-and-after photos of brow lamination, and I wondered… could I do better, brow-wise? Should I?

So I contacted Lorna from The Brow Artist in Ranelagh, who came highly recommended to me from many excellently-eyebrowed people, and booked in for a consultation. Would she be able make my brows look like this? Short answer… no. Not right now. Because as it turns out, my brows are in shite.

Exhibit A: Brows in shite. Patchy, skinny, sparse at the tails.

Like many women before me, overplucking in my youth has damaged the hairs – I’d tried to create an arch that wasn’t naturally there, leaving weird gaps and hairs growing in at strange angles. Lorna begged me to be honest: How often did I pluck them? When I told her that I never really had to, her worst fears were confirmed. Transforming my brows is going to be a big, long-term project.

She prescribed me a brow growth serum on the spot, in the hopes that we can encourage the little hairs to come back out to play again. Then she sat me down and gave me the first tint and shape of my life. Tears leaked from my eyes throughout the small bit of threading that she did (it’s very sore, I can’t lie), and I sneezed non-stop during the tweezing.

When she left me to marinade in my brow tint for a few minutes, I looked like I’d been weeping for hours:

But the finished product was amazing. I’m no longer sure why I didn’t start doing this years ago. My eyebrows look full and healthy (at least on the surface) and require nothing but a slick of brow gel in the morning. Lorna wanted to give me something to work towards, and if the end result is brows that look good with little to no effort on my part, then I’m all in.

Including a pic of myself made up a few days later just to let you all know I can in fact look better than the photo on the left. Thanks.

She sent me away with some homework to do: Apply my growth serum daily, return to The Brow Artist for monthly maintenance, and refrain from plucking at all costs. My brow recovery is going to be a long process, so I’m writing this monthly diary to show my progress and hold myself accountable. With any luck, 2020 will be my Year of Good Brows. Watch this space.

• Beauty
• Brow Lamination
• Brows
• Eyebrows