Kaia Gerber for Loewe FW20. Photo: Indigital
Want to know the secret behind perfect brows? It’s all about care, nurture and patience. To attain the ideal arch and thickness takes effort and precise grooming. But fear not, if you have the right tools, and follow the right methods, you can achieve salon-worthy, Audrey Hepburn-esque brows from home. Trust us. Here’s our guide on how to make tweezing your eyebrows from home less painful.
1. Take a hot shower
Founder of Anastasia Beverly Hills, Anastasia Soare (aka the brow queen), recommends taking a hot shower or using a warm compress on the brows prior to tweezing them. “This will help open up the pores and ease discomfort,” she says.
New York City-based dermatologist Mona Gohara supports this trick as well, but also warns against using a hot compress after you tweeze; instead, use a cold one to help reduce any inflammation that was caused due to pulling hairs out of the skin.
2. Stay away from magnifying mirrors
As tempting as they can be, magnifying mirrors can be so dangerous. Soare says they’re the quickest path to getting carried away, and chances are, you don’t need to tweeze as much as you think.
“Brows should begin directly above the middle of your nostrils, end where the corner of the nostril connects with the outer corner of the eye, and the highest point of the arch should connect the middle of the tip of the nose with the middle of the iris,” says Soare. If you fill in your brows using these guidelines prior to tweezing, it will ensure you don’t get “tweezer-happy,” causing yourself more pain.
3. Pick the right tweezer
Since your brow bone is curved, Soare recommends using a quality pair of slant-tipped tweezers to avoid breaking off the hair too far from the skin’s base; this will cause unnecessary pain. We love the Tweezerman Slant Tweezer (a three-time Best of Beauty winner) because it will fully yank out the thickest hair as well as the finest baby hairs.
4. Tweeze the right way
Once you have your tweezers, you’ll want to ensure you’re doing the deed correctly. “You always want to make sure you are getting as close to the base as possible and tweezing the hair in the direction of its growth,” Soare says. I can stand by this rule from personal experience. Plucking my hair in the opposite direction of growth makes my skin super irritated, and it hurts so, so bad.
5. Cortisone cream is your new BFF
Cortisone cream is a topical anti-inflammatory that should be in everyone’s medicine cabinet. “After any hair-removal procedure, I always apply a bit of cortisone. This precludes a lot of pain drama,” Gohara says. Cortisone cream can be found at any drugstore and can be used for irritation caused by tweezing, bug bites, eczema and more. It’s really magic in a tube.
Now that you have these tips and tricks to help reduce pain from tweezing, I will leave you with this thought: Beauty doesn’t always have to be pain.
