Praised Eyebrows

Praised eyebrows

 by Natalie Reilly










Plucked perfection ... arch placement is the key to "facelift eyebrows".
"Facelift eyebrows" are your best beauty friend, writes Natalie Reilly.

Comedian Groucho Marx once said that he didn't care to belong to any club that would accept him as a member. And I can relate. Not because I never cared for professional eyebrow shaping, despite my obvious limitations with tweezers, but because on the day I finally joined the ranks of those who have their brows done professionally, I looked like him at the end of it.

It all began when I admired my boss's brows. They are neither too thick nor too thin. And the arch - itself a subtle work of art - is at just the right point above the eye. They are, in her words, "facelift eyebrows". If you're raising your own brows right now at the seeming triviality of this analysis - and you're not a hairless man - I am going to pronounce you ignorant to your face. Your very face, madam! Because, you see, the shape of an eyebrow is like a toilet: nobody really thinks about it until it stops working - and then it's a repugnant mess.

So I went to the man my boss sees, Steve Supple. After a brief conversation about my hopes and wishes for my face framers, and a discussion about the $75 cost, he began in earnest. First, he cleansed the area. Then he measured my eyebrows to work out where they should start and finish and exactly where the arch should be. Explanatory brag: Steve told me my arch was well developed and already at just the right spot. Then he recommended a tint for my brows, because, he said, they were a couple of shades lighter than my hair. After tinting, he trimmed, waxed, tweezed and even threaded my eyebrows - a type of hair removal done with a thread of string. Then he filled them in with a pencil. Next came what I consider to be the stealth weapon of eyebrow upkeep, an arch-enhancing pencil, which he orders from the UK. He applied it to the skin directly under the brow, and it not only blended in with the skin's pigment, the matt pink finish also accentuated the arch. He topped it all off with a brow gel and urged me to look in the mirror. Steve called them "power brows", but all I could see was Groucho.

I smiled weakly and fled, covering my forehead with my hand as if I were a Jane Austen character suffering from a 19th-century damsel's fever, namely feminine regret. But, after cleansing, the tint faded, as Steve promised it would, and by the next morning, I was happy to see that I too had acquired facelift eyebrows - a club I'm pleased to say that, after years of DIY brow peaks and troughs, I'm happy to belong to.