Eyebrow Pencils & Filling In

Eyebrow Pencils

Eyebrow Pencils: Choosing Them and How to Use Them

Eyebrow pencils are possibly the most commonly misused cosmetic tool in the arsenal of many women. Aside from the often tragically comical looks worn by women who were convinced in decades past that the “right thing to do” was to remove their natural brows and “draw in” new ones, we also have less-striking errors like choosing the wrong color of brow pencil (or using the eyeliner pencil interchangeably for the brows).

Now, we’ve covered some of the basics of eye make-up, but we should focus more on some of the specific and common errors that some women make. Let’s start with some of the biggest errors:

Enhance What You Have, Don’t Draw New Ones…

As mentioned above, some women (even some younger women) have been made to think that because their natural eyebrows are sparse, or light in color, that they are supposed to use an eyebrow pencil to create the look they don’t have naturally. If I can know that I’ll never again see a woman making this mistake, I can die happy. If you take nothing else away from this article, please remember that you should never shave off any hair from the body just so you can draw it in again.

Now let’s look at the ways to enhance the brows effectively. We’ll start at the first steps:

Choosing Your Eyebrow Pencil…

It seems like common sense to choose the right shade of eyebrow pencil, yet women often get it wrong. Since the goal is to “enhance” the brows, choosing a shade that is the same or darker than your natural brows, can cause the brows to look too heavy. Therefore, you want to select a shade for your eyebrow pencil that is a little lighter than your natural brows.

Luckily, most companies make a smaller range of colors for eyebrows than for other enhancement cosmetics, and these limited palettes are meant to correspond to the natural range of colors. Just look for the selection of shades available and select the one that is closest to your natural shade, but slightly lighter. This means that you ONLY want to select anything approaching a black eyebrow pencil if YOUR NATURAL brows are truly black.

However, as usual, there is an exception. For those with very blonde hair, you will likely find yourself having to choose a brow pencil that is darker than your natural shade. In some cases, some blonde women have naturally dark eyebrows. But for those whose brows are pale blonde, just go with the shade nearest your natural color whether or not it’s lighter.

{NOTE: I realize that there are other sites and sources out there that tell you to choose a brow pencil color that is ‘darker’ than your natural hair color. However, it is my experience that this doesn’t give the best results and leaves the individual with a “made-up” appearance. This may work in some circumstances, but since modern trends in make-up favor natural-based looks for most situations, you really want to keep to a lighter eyebrow pencil or else you’ll look dated.}

In addition to choosing the right shade of eyebrow pencil, you also want to pay attention to the way your brow pencil works. Since the proper use of a brow pencil involves having a good point on the pencil, you need to keep this in mind when you look at your options. Your brow pencil should have a sharpening apparatus. Even in cases of the “twist up” type of brow pencil, you should have some means to refine the point of the pencil, so that you can create the fine feathery strokes to give a natural-looking result.
 ow to Use Your Eyebrow Pencil…

When you’ve chosen your brow pencil, the next step is to learn to use it properly. Since the goal is enhancement of the brows, we need to discuss exactly what that means. There are two main functions brow enhancement is meant to perform: either you mean to fill-in sparse brows, or you mean to emphasize the arch of your natural brow.

Fill-In Technique

For those women whose eyebrows are sparse or pale, the act of filling in the brows is fairly simple, once you get the technique down. You don’t want to treat it as a “coloring in” process, but rather imitate the appearance of the short hairs that make up the brows in the first place. This means that you want a sharpened point on your brow pencil, and you want to apply the pencil using short, feathery strokes.

You can overlap the strokes a little, but use caution to avoid applying the pencil marks too heavily. Keep the strokes centered within the boundaries of the natural brows, and be sure to adapt them to the areas of the brows where they may be thicker or thinner. It is presumed that you will have already done some grooming of the brows to reshape and define them, so you’ll have a definite “area” in which to contain your pencil strokes.

Finish the look by using a eye-makeup brush to softly blur the pencil strokes (or use a cotton swab, makeup applicator or even a very gentle fingertip stroke). Remember, the goal is to soften the look of the strokes, not to smear them out of recognition.

Arch Emphasis

Once again, with this technique, it’s presumed that you’ve already shaped, tweezed and/or waxed your brows into two distinct, arched shapes of whatever configuration suits your preferences. It also presumes that your brows are normal in density and not in need of artificial “fill in”.

In this case, you are merely looking to emphasize the arching curve of the brow. To do this, you want to use the same short, feathered strokes as with the fill-in technique. Only this time, take the strokes and start with the bottom of the inner corner of the brow and curve the strokes gently upward to the highest point of the arch. The strokes should just touch outside the upper reach of the brow’s curve, then curve downward and end up beneath the outer tip of the brow line.

By exaggerating the natural arching within the boundaries of the brows, you emphasize the arch without making the look appear artificial. Just don’t let the exaggeration of the arch turn into too much emphasis.

Again, finish the look by blending the pencil strokes slightly in order to soften the look of the pencil strokes.