Beauty trends are not something I often pay attention to. When it comes to my face, I feel I’ve known what suits it best since I first started ploughing my part-time Brown Thomas wage right back into the company via Estee Lauder foundations, MAC pigments and Clinique’s 3-Step Skin Care System. I’m very much a ‘case-by-case’ critic when it comes to cosmetic surgery and frankly, massages just have more of an appeal to me (and my knot-laden shoulders) than facials ever could, so I guess you could say when it comes to messing with my visage, I just don’t think it’s ‘worth it’.
I had my eyebrows shaped once in my life; when I was 16 and a friend’s continuous ‘suggestions’ to have them ‘looked at’ was bordering on harassment. But after that I just let them find their own form with a brush here and a pluck there (NEVER above the brow, my mother says). It wasn’t until being stalked by those ‘Holly Willoughby/Demi Moore/Julia Roberts Posts Make-up Free Pic on Twitter’ articles that I realised something needed to be done to take me from ‘meh’ (read: nonchalantly) to ‘meh’ (read: agreeably).
This year is all about brows, from Fendi’s gold frosted brows to Chanel’s amusingly bejewelled creations on the S/S and A/W catwalks respectively. Brows are becoming more prominent, shaping the face, lifting it, framing it – the focus on them, for me, can’t be denied. Now I could blame my already hyper alertness of these two slugs of hair on Demi Moore’s penchant for social media, or Maison Lesage’s acquisition by Chanel, but when I met a friend a couple of weeks ago I noticed she looked distinctively less tired and, if I’m honest, a bit better looking than usual. When she declared it to be the work of HD Brows in Brown Sugar, I was on the phone to make an appointment.
HD Brows is a process which involves a seven-step procedure where, after a shape consultation, the therapist uses a mixture of techniques including threading, tweezing, plucking and tinting to perfect and define your brows. Before all that began however, I had to have a skin test in the salon, which took about one-and-a-half minutes to carry out.
On the day Dearbhla, one of Brown Sugar‘s resident brow experts, asked me how I would like my brows to look and proposed a shape and colour that she felt would suit my overall look and complexion. I felt completely at ease in her hands and asked her advice when it came to choosing the best tint for me out of a variety of colours. After about 40 minutes of waxing, soothing (with a specially formulated lotion that felt divine!), tinting, threading (to blend the brows) and tweezing (ABOVE the brow too, mother!) I stood up to take a look. My initial reaction was one of shock and unfamiliarity. Of course Jill sensed this and told me the redness would come down after an hour or two (though she used a tonic to close hair follicles and reduce redness) and that, after a shower, the colour of the hair would also reduce slightly. She then filled in my brows where needed and advised me to come back in four week’s time and in the meantime to resist every urge to try to tweeze them myself.
The next day I arrived at my mirror to see two beautifully sculptured, and surprisingly unsurprising looking brows. I was so content with them that I slapped on a bit of Clarins BB and headed off chirpily to work!
After a week I needed to pencil them in, but this is normal according to Dearbhla, who told me that the whole process does in fact require a couple of visits to tame and shape the brows for a long term look.
Unfortunately when I realised I had a wedding to attend a few weeks later I couldn’t help myself and had at them. I’m pretty annoyed and, weirdly, somewhat ashamed of myself for not holding out for my next appointment and have decided while writing this to commit to the no-pluck marathon again for the next few weeks.
My feeling however is that if I had a wedding/honeymoon to look forward to that the discomfort of being face-to-face with another human being (who in honesty probably has more to worry about than my grown-out brows) might just worth it to create movie-star like brows for my big day.
HD Brow treatment costs €30 from Brown Sugar
Brown Sugar
50 South William Street,
Dublin 2, Ireland.
Tel + 353 (0)1 6169967
Email: [email protected]
By Karen Birney