by Alexandra Nicole Nuralam

Brow Basics: 5 Tips to Maintain Your Brows At Home

Brows 101: Your complete guide to shaping, tweezing and waxing your brows at home.

Well-maintained brows take just the right amount of shaping, tweezing and a whole lot of restraint—the best advice we can offer for at-home brow care is to keep it minimal. The biggest mistake people make when trying to maintain their brows at home is over-tweezing; just ask anyone who did in the ’90s. Below you’ll find an overview of the brow basics, including our favourite brow serum for fuller brows and steps for tackling tweezing and waxing.

First, here’s what to do if you want brow growth:

If your brows are on the sparse side, now is the perfect time to let them grow—since we’re all stuck at home anyway. We love Xlash’s Xbrow Eyebrow Serum; formulated with biotin, it’s the perfect serum to give you fuller and thicker eyebrows within 4 to 6 weeks.

1. Cleanse your face

You want nice and clean skin before you start because it’s one of the best ways to avoid post-plucking breakouts. Wash your face or at least clean the area before you begin. Remember to disinfect your tweezers as well!

2. Determine how much eyebrow hair you should remove

Start by figuring out where you should tweeze, because you don’t want to take off too much hair. It’s extremely easy to overpluck in general—hence the entirety of the 1990s—but filling in your brows before grooming them is an easy way to avoid that. Use a brow pencil as a stencil, so you can see which hairs need to be tweezed away.

Outline the top of and below your brow with soft strokes, and fill in the middle section. Blend well and after that, it’s just a matter of using slanted tweezers to pluck the stray hairs that lie out of the makeup’s range. Be sure to tweeze any hairs between your brows, on your forehead, temples and upper eyelids.

3. Tweeze with good lighting

If there’s one thing you need to make sure to have before you go in on your eyebrows, it’s really, really good lighting. Removing your eyebrow hairs in a dimly lit bathroom is pretty much a beauty disaster in the making. Bright, natural daylight is the best setting for tweezing. Take a mirror you can prop up and tweeze near a window with even lighting on your face.

4. Don’t overdo it with the plucking

We said it before and we’ll say it again: Be extra careful. Whether tweezing or waxing, your golden rule should be to remove only the smallest amount of hair you can. Once you take off too much, you can’t put it back!

5. If you’re going to trim, do it sparingly

Just like how it’s easy to cut bangs that are too short and uneven, it’s easy to overestimate how much brow hair you should trim. This is where a brow gel can come in handy: brush the hairs upwards towards the hairline and towards the temple. Let it dry before you trim the hairs that are sticking too far out.

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