Fashion for Less: Go Pluck Yourself!

Occasionally I consider small ways in which I can cut back my spending, and so far my tactics of not buying coffee on my way to work and trimming my own hair in between cuts have saved me a lot of cash.  Doing your own eyebrows is another way to cut back on routine beauty spending.  Although it’s affordable enough to get them waxed once and then tidy them up around the edges, it is also very simple to do it yourself from square one!

messy hair but good brows....

When I was younger my mom used to coerce me to go get my eyebrows waxed and I begrudgingly obliged.  Then I would just let them get all teen-wolf until she would drag me back to the salon.  I just really did not care.  But as I got older I realized the appeal of having lovely arched brows.  It was an important component to the vintage style I was slowly adopting.  So, I read up on the subject (I think in Seventeen sometime in high school and the beauty section of Border’s) and that knowledge plus my few years of experience is what I offer to you today. 

The most important thing about having beautiful brows is the shape.  This should be determined by the amount of plucking you do to the bottom of the brow.  Generally, I would say to avoid plucking the top other than to tidy it up, or else you’ll end up with a pencil thin line that looks cartoonish.  So how do you determine where to arch, the length, or the width? Well, if you hold up your tweezers (or in my illustration a red crayon) to your eye right at your tear duct and follow the line up, that’s a good place for them to start.  If yours are naturally a little more or less, that’s fine. This is a rough guideline and as long as you’re not into unibrow territory you have some leeway.

 

For the ending point hold the tweezers up to the angle of your lower eyelid like this:

That’s about where they should end. 

Now’s the part you’ve all been waiting for, the arch.  Do a similar move by putting the tweezers at the lower curve of your iris (the colored part of your eye) and that’s where the arch should begin.  Like so:

(Now, if you have a pretty straight across brow with little thinned out hairs on top it is helpful to take some powder and an angled brush and fill in those spaced out hairs to help create the angle you want before the next step.) 

Then carve out a triangle from the bottom to make the arch.  The idea is that the first part should be the thickest and then gradually thin out to the point at the end.  

What I like about this method is that it works on all different types of brows and on all different types of faces.  It doesn't create a uniform shape like some of the at-home waxing kit templates do, rather it allows the unique nature of the brows to remain in a more polished form.  

Soon, I'll post some photos of me putting this plan into action on people other than myself.

pleasant plucking!