Your Eyebrows Need Help. Here's How to Fix Them.
If your eyes are the windows to your soul, then your eyebrows are the curtains. When they’re good, they help accentuate your face and make your eyes look that much more magnetic. When they’re bad, they’re distracting. Men’s eyebrows tend to be fuller and hairier than women’s brows-and lucky for us, bushy brows are on trend. But even if you’re not in the market to pump up your brows, you still might need to maintain them.
Bushy-ness comes with its own set of issues. Eyebrow hairs tend to grow at different lengths and can get unruly, errant hairs can make the shape of brows look scraggly, and don’t even get us started on the unibrow problem. Don’t run to the waxing salon yet (we believe most men don’t need to wax their brows).
Keeping your brows trim and neat is easy to do at home with these simple steps.
Step 1: Brush Them Up
Using a mustache comb, brush your eyebrows upward so the hairs point toward your forehead. This will help you see which hairs are longer and extend beyond the natural top line of your brows.
If your brows are on the thinner side, use a mascara applicator instead of a comb. The tighter bristles will help grab thinner hairs that a comb might miss. You don’t have to use an actual mascara wand either-you can buy clean applicator wands by themselves.
Step 2: Trim the Outsiders
Once your eyebrow hairs are brushed to be as vertical as possible, use tiny scissors to delicately trim any hairs that extend beyond the top line of your brows. Use the natural line as a guide and don’t go into the middle of the brow or you’ll risk creating a hole. The goal here is to create a nice uniform shape.
Step 3: Take Out Volume With a Trimmer
Scissors are usually sufficient to trim errant hairs that can make brows look messy, but if you have especially heavy brows, a specially-designs eyebrow trimmer is useful for cutting through some of the bulk. Don’t try to do this with scissors-a trimmer will create a more uniform look. Make sure it’s a trimmer specifically made for eyebrows (don’t think your beard trimmer will do the same job or you’ll risk shaving them off). Gently move the trimmer across your brows the way the hairs are pointing (with the grain) until everything is a uniform length.
Step 4: Clean It Up
Now that your brows are trimmed, attack errant hairs around the perimeter with a pair of tweezers. Remember, we’re not trying to shape the brows, we’re just cleaning them up. Pluck isolated hairs that lie outside the brows themselves, like at the edges and in the middle about your nose (the unibrow zone). Tweezing is better than shaving, which is hard to do effectively in such a hard to navigate area.
Step 5: Slick Them Down (Optional)
Once you’ve tweezed away the outliers, splash your face with water to flush the area of trimmings. Apply a clear brow gel which will help smooth the brows down so they look uniform and shiny without adding any color. Bonus: It makes it easier to see if you’ve missed any hairs that need trimming.
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