My brows and I have had a roller coaster of a relationship. From the age of around two they expanded all the way up my forehead, joining up to my hairline and making me look like an offspring of Wolverine. It was all cool until hormones starting kicking in and fellow classmates picked up on the resemblance, leading me to an unfortunate incident one night involving a pair of nail scissors – lets just say there was some ‘pruning‘ involved – and things have never been the same since. I was 10 and my Mum was having to pencil in my brows for me each day before school. I had to skip swimming practice for a few weeks until they grew back. Oh the shame. I told my friends I’d had an allergic reaction to body glitter. True story.
Of course the nail scissors thing was just a phase. Then I found tweezers and things got really interesting. I got so pluck happy that I’m amazed that even one hair remained. I dub these the ‘tadpole years’ – they were like mini rotated ‘L’ shapes on my head that were a single hair long in breadth. It wasn’t until I reached sixth form that things started to regain some fullness; that’s eight years of puny excuses for brows. Ain’t nobody got time for that. By Uni I realised that the only way to combat the no-brow/mono-brow issue was to step away from the tweezers for a bit and finally five years later, after full recovery from the odd overzealous plucking session where I fell back into old habits, I felt happy with where they’d got to.
In hindsight I should have searched out professional brow attention a long time ago. Like a decade ago. But aside from a brief dalliance with waxing in a Benefit Brow Bar a few years back, which although I was happy with at the time, I look back on and think that a tad too much hair was disposed of that day, I’d never really sought out what my brows really needed all along – shape. That was until a chance peruse round John Lewis led me to a Blink counter and Lily (thanks for the action pic LP!) gave me the shove that I needed…
I’d heard good things about threading, but boy am I converted. The method uses a cotton thread to glide over the skin, grabbing unwanted hairs as it goes. It sounds bizarre, looks bizarre and feels bizarre. When I mentioned I’d had the treatment on Twitter the number one question was – does it hurt? And I can’t lie to you, it wasn’t pain free, but if you’re a regular tweezer then this is just a tad more eye watering than that. If I can man up and do it, anyone can. And it was so worth it for the results. Balanced brows for the first time since that nail scissor episode, with such clean lines and such shape. I now just add a dab of pencil through the front of my less lush brow and I’m done.
It’s not for everyone mind you. A snap proclaiming my love for threading on Instagram sparked some debate in the comments with waxers giving their side of the story and straight up pluckers offering up theirs because as with every regime in the world of beauty there isn’t a one size fits all solution. But for me threading fits. I’ve already eased on the plucking so I’m ready for my next session which judging by my rate of growth will be in the blink of an eye. I’m sorry – I just had to.
Comments