Eyebrow Makeup | Vanity Claire

ClaireJanuary 6, 2014

How to Shape Your Eyebrows at Home | Eyebrow Stencils

I’m well aware that this is a #FirstWorldProblems issue, but I’ve got to admit that I spend an alarming amount of my time worrying about my eyebrows.

Like most other girls of my age in the UK, in my teens I definitely followed the ‘less is more’ mantra for my eyebrows and so between the ages of about 13 to 18 – okay, 13 to 21 (embarrassing) – I barely had any eyebrow to speak of. Eventually, big eyebrows came into fashion and we all realised that we looked like chavvy gimps. The challenge then was how to go about growing out our eyebows and, even more problematically, what the hell we were supposed to do with them afterwards.

Eyebrow shaping is a tricky thing, no matter what magazines tell you about just ‘following the natural arch’. What the hell? I plucked away my natural arch years ago and it’s not showing much sign of coming back.

Many people therefore choose to leave eyebrow shaping to the professionals – but even that is a risky business. Once I spent months and months religiously growing out my eyebrows, only to go and have them threaded by a woman who – despite me saying over and over again “I just want them tidying up” – went on to completely rip out all of my hairs and leave me with baldy chicken skin. So, if we can’t trust the professionals to shape our eyebrows, what can we do? The answer is simple – eyebrow stencils.

What Are Eyebrow Stencils?

Eyebrow stencils are things I only learned about a few months ago. I think they’re mainly used for girls who draw on/fill in their eyebrows every day and want to achieve the same flawless shape each time, but they can also be used for initially shaping.

I bought a pack of stencils from eBay, which you can get for the tiny price of £1.29. This came with 4 stencils, all different shapes so you can choose the right one for you. Some were super thin, so I opt for C2 which is the thickest shape of the 4. If you’re not sure which stencil to use then you can always outline with each of them in turn to decide which one suits you best before plunging in with the plucking.

How to Use Eyebrow Stencils

Shaping your eyebrows with stencils is pretty straightforward. Use the stencils and make an outline of the shape on your eyebrows. You could do this with powder or pencil, but I prefer to use a liquid eyeliner pen – mainly because I think it looks really funny. Apologies I couldn’t get any photos of this actual step – I needed a third hand coming out of my arse to do so, and unfortunately humans haven’t evolved to have that yet.

Once you have your shape, start plucking away around the outline with gay abandon. However scary it might be, my top tip is to trust the stencil. Don’t get attached to where your eyebrow hairs used to be and feel like you’re plucking too much – you need to follow the stencil if you want to get the proper shape. Also, that old saying about never plucking above your eyebrow – I’d say just ignore it. The majority of the time when you get your brows done professionally they’ll go above the eyebrow, so I think it’s just one of those beauty myths.

Once you’ve finished plucking, wash off the outline and say hello to your new eyebrows. As well as getting rid of a lot of unneeded hair, I think the stencils are also brilliant for showing you the parts of your eyebrows that you need to grow back. Particularly when it comes to the middle part of my brows, I have a tendency to over-pluck, and carry on plucking whenever the strays grow back. The stencils should show you where your eyebrows should really start from, meaning that you know to grow these bits out (and can fill in with powder/pencil in the meantime).

Overall I think eyebrow stencils are a good DIY eyebrow shaping tool, and are perfect for those of us who are a bit scared of our own eyebrows. For such a cheap price they’re definitely worth giving a go.

What do you use to shape your eyebrows? Do you ever DIY or do you trust the professionals?

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ClaireNovember 15, 2013

MUA Pro-Brow Eyebrow Kit | Review

‘Ello chaps!

If you read our MUA haul post (can we call it a haul? We probably spent less than £20 between us…), you might have noticed that I picked up their Pro-Brow Eyebrow Kit.

Eyebrows are a big part of my life. I probably spend more time drawing my eyebrows on in the morning than doing anything else and nothing distresses me more than a wonky brow (apart from you know, war and running out of hair bobbles). I have paley-paley eyebrows, which means I look like a lunatic without eyebrow makeup- particularly after dying my hair brown. I’m a big fan of eyebow kits as opposed to eyebrow pencils, mostly because I think you have a lot more freedom in terms of shape. Pencils also don’t give the same finish as powders and wax, so I say yay to eyebrow kits and nay to nasty pencils.

My all-time favourite kit in the history of the world ever is the Sleek Brow Kit (which I reviewed here), but I thought that I’d give this MUA one a whirl – mostly because it is just £3.50. You heard it here first guys, this is cheaper than a cheap thing on wheels.

MUA have called it (nice and succinctly), the Pro-Brow Ultimate Eyebrow Kit, All-in-One Shape, Shade and Highlight. For all you Benefit fans, this is somewhat similar to the Brow Zings eyebrow kit or the Brows-a-Gogo eyebrow kit. I say this mostly because MUA have included a mini pair of tweezers, a brush, two main brow shades, a highlighter (we’ll get to this…) and an eyebrow gel.

In a bit more detail, the Pro-Brow Kit has two brow shades: a deep chocolate brown and a paler more tan coloured brown. These are both powders and quite obviously, designed to fill in your eyebrows and I have no complaints really. They’re fairly pigmented and buildable – I’ve found that I do a couple of layers of the deep brown for my scousebrows. I don’t have much use for the lighter colour, but it may come in handy if I ever go lighter with my hair. The powder is quite loose as you can probably tell from the swatches, so beware of fallout chums!

The highligher I have beef with. It’s in no way light enough to be a highlighter in the way I know highlighters. For my browbone, I tend to use a very light shimmery colour and this bizarre tan colour is far too dark. I tried to give it a go but I just looked mad.

The gel is fine, it took a bit of getting used to after using a lot of waxes in the past, but it keeps my eyebrow hairs in place and is most excellent for neatening things up a bit.

The brush is another part of the kit I didn’t get on with at all. As it is such a cheap eyebrow kit, it’s not really a big surprise that it isn’t great quality although I was a bit disappointed. The brush has really thick, firm plastic bristles that are impossible to work with – I wasn’t able to draw on my eyebrow shape accurately and it just made the powder go all over the place. Thankfully, I had my Sleek brush to hand and that worked perfectly. If you do plan on purchasing this bad boy, make sure you have a back up brush!

Overall, I really like the kit. I’m aware that I sound like a terribly Negative Nancy about it, but on the whole it is a great eyebrow kit. Some things leave a bit to be desired (what even is the highlighter?) but it’s doing to job of giving me eyebrows when there used to be none. HUZZAH AND THANKS TO ~~MERRY ENGLAND~~ MUA.

Has anyone else used this little kit? What do you reckon?

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ClaireSeptember 4, 2013

Barry M Liquid Brow Marker Pen: Review

I hate to be the bearer of bad news (what am I talking about, I LOVE BEING THE BEARER OF BAD NEWS), but this is going to be a blog post full of hatred and disgust.

I’m usually a ~~big slut~~ big lover for all beauty products and I don’t usually dislike things very often. As long is it vaguely looks ok, then it will have a place in my leopard print makeup bag. Unfortunately, today is a day that I have to hate on a beauty product. I have tried to like it, I truly have. But I just can’t, mainly because it doesn’t do the job properly and makes me look like an idiot.

This mysterious product, if you hadn’t gathered from the giant picture and the title of this blog post, is Barry M’s Liquid Brow Marker Pen. I bought it at the weekend because I’m on the dregs of my Sleek Brow Kit (which I love by the way!) and I also needed some change for the bus (which is a great excuse to pop into Boots if you ever need one). I decided to branch out and get something different to my Sleek Brow Kit and spotted this eyebrow product lurking in the Barry M makeup display. You might have heard me shout ‘GREAT SCOTT, what sorcery is this’ if you’d been there at the time, as I rushed to shove it in my basket and pay.

I really like the idea of marker pen style makeup. They’re great for the cack-handed like me, and it makes me feel a little bit like Picasso every time I draw on my face. Unfortunately, the Liquid Brow Marker Pen actually made me look like one of Picasso’s abstract paintings and I have to say that this is THE MOST USELESS product in the history of useless products. I have a few main issues with it, which I have decided to list in a handy list (oo-er) for you all.

1. It doesn’t work properly if you have any foundation/makeup lurking in your eyebrows: This is an issue. I don’t know how you all do your makeup, but I tend to whack on my foundation/concealer and then do my eyebrows. This means that there tends to be a bit of product in there and while I could remove it with a cotton bud, why on earth would I bother doing that?! The problem with the Brow Marker Pen is that once the nib (ew) gets a bit of other product on it, it stops working. Basically, no more brown eyebrow stuff comes out of it and you look like a fool scraping away at your face with useless marker pen that is progressively ruining your morning makeup.

2. The colour that comes out is uneven: Even if you manage to get the pen working normally, the colour that comes out isn’t that even. I don’t know about you guys, but I don’t have time to faff around going over and over my eyebrows to make sure they don’t look patchy and bald. NO THANK YOU. (This is particularly problematic for me, because I have to draw my eyebrows on from scratch. I have blonde brows, so it is a full on mission rather than just filling in!)

3. The ends of your eyebrows are DIFFICULT to do: As you can probably see from my tragic eyebrow picture, doing the outer ends of your eyebrows is really difficult with the Brow Marker Pen. I find that it slips a bit and gets all wonky. If the nib has stopped working too, then you have to faff around trying to use the side and IT ALL GOES HORRIBLY WRONG AND YOU END UP LOOKING LIKE A MAD PERSON.

All in all, I ended up spending longer on my eyebrows than the rest of my face when using the Barry M Liquid Brow Marker Pen. What is the point I ask you? This product might be ok if you already have dark eyebrows and just want to fill them in a little bit, but if you’re looking for heavy duty eyebrow makeup like I am, don’t bother. I was forced to fill in and try and fix the Brow Pen disaster with the last of my Sleek kit, and this was the result. Much better, ja?! JA.

I think I’m just going to go back to my Sleek Brow Kit but if you guys have any other recommendations, please let me know! I would love to try something new and not tragically horrible.

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ClaireMay 20, 2013

Sleek Brow Kit: Review

We are in the year of the Strong Brow. Some might say that Cara Delevinge made the look popular but ever since discovering Erin O’Conner, I’ve had a big and inappropriate crush on striking eyebrows. Thankfully, gone are the horrible high school days of plucking brows so thin that we all looked permanently surprise and/or terrified. We can now draw our eyebrows on with gay abandon and look super trendy and cool while doing it.

I feel like I can now claim the title of professional eyebrow artist. I’ve been drawing my brows on for a few years now and have dabbled in pretty much every method available. For those of you who are lucky enough to see me without makeup on, you will know that I look like a strange albino Lord Voldemort without my trusty eyebrows, so I do my best to rectify the situation. As a secret ginger, my eyelash and eyebrow hair is really, really pale and you cant really see it at all from afar/in pictures. Things were ok when I used to have blonde hair, but it’s all a bit of a mess now that I have migrated to the dark side. Good eyebrows are a necessity so I’ve put together a little ‘how to’ with my favourite eyebrow product for those who have no eyebrows like me or who just want a bit more definition.

For your entertainment, here is a picture of me without my eyebrows drawn on. Someone at work said “it wasn’t that bad” but they clearly couldn’t see the giant five head in front of them.

My absolute favourite eyebrow product is the eyebrow palette by Sleek. Sleek do loads of brilliant stuff, which tend to be the cheaper alternatives to Benefit products. The Brow Kit I use is the ‘Dark’ colour but they also come in ‘Light’, ‘Black’ and ‘Extra Dark’. I can’t stress how great the Sleek Brow Kit’s are. They come with little mini tweezers (which I unfortunately lost – but before I did, I gave them a whirl and they are good quality for a mini pair), an angled brush and a small powder brush. There are two products within the kit; an eyebrow wax and setting powder. The idea is to use these both in tandem to create perfect eyebrows.

To start with, I always use the kit after I’ve applied the rest of my makeup. I tend to follow the top and bottom line of my eyebrow and then use the flat side of the angled brush to fill them in. I then apply the setting powder (they recommend sparingly but I just whack loads on willy nilly) and my brows are done! It usually takes a couple of minutes, which is a lot quicker than when I used to use a pencil. The kits are also good for precision, which you don’t get as well with a pencil or eyebrow powder. That’s pretty much it really. The kit retails at £8.49 online but I think I got mine for about £8.00 in Superdrug.

What do you all think? Have you tried the Sleek Brow Kit?