Big, bold, bushy brows are as coveted right now as the It Girl who made them a thing (hey, Cara Delevingne, I'm talking to you). But in the late '90s, when I was a teenager, brows were as waif-like as the supermodels that papered my walls. My friends and I would rough-brush ours from side to side, hoping to uproot a few hairs in the process. We'd trim them with scissors, thin out random patches with tweezers, and fine-tune our arches with precision. At some point, the brows just stopped growing back.
Fast-forward to today, and I'm now on an elaborate quest to fake my way back to bushy. I try anything I can get my hands on — often multiple products at once. And from a distance, most things look fine. But up close, the results are sketchy at best. Here's a look at what different products look like when I have them on:
Everything about them looks uneven — the length, shape, even position on my face — thanks to my shaky hand.
Despite being a perfect brow match, the pigment makes the skin along the tops of my brows look like they've been spray-tanned by an Oompa Loompa.
I have to preface this by saying that the only thing that's ever truly looked as natural as my teenage brows was professional brow tinting. Using vegetable dye and a small brush, a technician tints the tiny baby hairs that surround your brows, making them taller, wider, and fuller. I tried it a few times but quit; it just fades too quickly to justify the salon time and cost. So when I heard a friend comparing Yves Saint Laurent Couture Brow to the treatment? I couldn't get to the Cosmo beauty closet's brow bin fast enough!
Like professional brow tinting, this "brow mascara" allows you to tint the baby hairs surrounding your brows with a teeny-tiny mascara wand, bulking up bare spots. It's so easy, you can get results like I did in about 30 seconds (swear!).
It took a few tries to perfect my application, so here are some tips to remember:
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