Putting your best brows forward

The shape of a woman's eyebrows can dramatically alter the ways she looks, but the above picture is what one of my brows looked like less than a week ago.

I'm the kind of girl who kind of obsesses over my eyebrows.  They're naturally thin, but I've always done a lot of maintenance to ensure they stay looking polished.  I usually try to tweeze a little each day to keep any stray hairs from disturbing my perfect little arch.

However, when winter came this season, something strange happened: some of my fine little hairs began to shed.  Weird, eh?  But not unheard of.  Cold weather can make our skin and the hair on our head a little more brittle, and the same thing happened to my eyebrow.

While I'm great at maintenance, I thoroughly believe shaping should be left to the professionals.  I know how to properly shape brows, but the mirror can be so elusive when trying to create a shape on your own face.  Instead of playing guessing games concerning which hairs to pluck as they grew back in, I decided to take the plunge and completely grow my brows back out - something I haven't done in literally years.

After a month, my brows looked like this:

Obviously, it wasn't my most flattering look to date.

There are many methods for grooming eyebrows, such as tweezing and waxing, but, ultimately, I decided to try something I'd never done before: threading.  Threading is done by a "professional threader," so-to-speak, by using a technique with a string that I don't quite understand but am intrigued by.  Somehow, the thread is manipulated to extract the hairs.

Technically, I'd had another area of hair removed by threading before [ahem, long sideburns], but never my eyebrows.  I'd heard a lot of positive things about the results, so I figured I'd try and report my findings to you, lovely readers.

Here was the outcome:

A beautifully arched brow with no stray hairs.

I was very impressed with the procedure.  It had the quickness of waxing with the precision of tweezing - the best of both worlds.

I have very sensitive skin, so I turned pretty red from the threading.  However, the lady performing the procedure provided aloe vera, and the redness subsided within an hour.  Also, there wasn't any risk of irritation or burn from hot wax, as there is with waxing.

I love the results and definitely prefer it to the other two methods of eyebrow grooming.

Since the eyebrows are such an important part of the face, I always fill them in to define them more when I do my makeup.

I prefer to use powder to fill the brows in because I think it gives it a softer look than the pencil method.  I use a simple brown powder from Bare Minerals that I love.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but that shouldn't stop you from putting your best brows forward!  Well maintained brows with a natural arch give you an immediate face lift, and I am completely pleased with the results of my eyebrow threading.  I would recommend threading to anyone and everyone!