Fixing over plucked and over arched brows: Tutorial

Actually, this was a requested tutorial, but a good idea to share! I will be sharing two different ways, one doing your brow with pencil and one using powder. The style I'm going to be doing my brows in is a more typical [and natural] asian brow, which tends to be thicker and less arched.

As you can see with my brows [not looking at how one is higher than the other; long story short, I tried raising just one eyebrow at a time, which doesn't come naturally to me, and my muscle got stuck and it hasn't come down since...] I over plucked them when I was younger and they never fully grew back in and my brow hairs are very sparse... But before just filling in your brow you need to understand how to measure your brow for the right shape to frame your eyes and the direction the hairs grow.

To measure where your brow starts [depending on your preference, your starting point will be your nostril or outer nostril] Start from the nostril and go straight up. To measure where your arch will be, start at your nostril again and angle towards the outer edge of your iris and on the angle/line that's where your arch should be. As for where your brow should end, once again start at your nostril and angle towards the very edge of your eye, along that line is where your brow should end. Now as for how high and how arched you want your brow, that's all up to you. 

Since I'm going for a more straight brow I won't be going crazy and making my arch quite shallow.

Now, as for how to fill your brow, you can choose to fill it out by colouring it in... But, as stated above, I want to go for a natural look, so I prefer to fill in my brows with short quick flicks in the direction my hairs grow, above [3rd picture] I've mapped out in pink the typical direction brow hairs grow you can see they start almost vertical, and as they reach the arch they get more slanted ans at the arch they can get almost horizontal, and they taper slightly downwards near the tail~

How I will be correcting my brows to fill them out is to fill out the top of the brow to be horizontal  lining up with my arch, creating volume that was missing.

Then I will be very slightly filling in under my arch and towards the tail too to balance out my brow and to create the shallower arch to my brow, not only thickening it but creating a totally different shape than my original eyebrow.

Pencil:

 When using pencil, I like to have my pencils sharp.
For brunette hair, I prefer using a taupe or a brown that doesn't have a red tint to it.. [black can be used occasionally but only to fill in sparse hairs... I find that black creates a very unnaturally dark brow that can overpower the face]
For blondes, I love taupes and even greys.. Anything overly yellow or orange will look very fake.
I like using 2 pencils, one lighter and one darker, I find it give more dimension to the brow and helps to  give the illusion that the brow isn't mostly drawn on.
I like to use the pencil to map out my brows like in my drawn example so I know where to start drawing and where to connect my lines.

First I go in with my taupe [the lighter colour] and using light short strokes create and fill in the start of the brow following the direction the hairs grow [first picture]

Next going in with the darker pencil, I fill in the space under the arch, I don't fill in much it's roughly the space of one or 2 hair rows and I fill in the tail darker also [second picture] 

Then I will go through with the darker pencil and flick in some hairs where I may have sparse hair growth or needs to look thicker.

An optional step, and a more in trend step is to have brows that fade from light to dark starting from the head. So, I take some of my face powder and slightly dust a bit in the very beginning of my brow.

Powder:

Same as I stated above with how I prefer brows to be coloured, I use taupe for my brunette brows. 

But since powders are lighter than a pencil, I use a black powder to fill in sparce spaces.

With my powders, I also use 2 different brushes.

I use a thin angled brush for my taupes, and a very fine eyeliner brush with the black shadow.

[if you want to use one brush, I recommend using the thin angled brush.]

 Once again, I start with mapping out my brows.

Using the lightest taupe, I fill in the start of the brow with short and light strokes working my way through the brow almost to the arch. Then going into the darker taupe I fill in the top part of the brow to make it thicker and to create a straighter brow using my natural arch as the marking point on how thick I make the upper part of my brow[top picture].

Also using the darker taupe I then start flicking in and filling in under my brow and the tail of my eyebrow, like I said in how I use the pencil, I only fill in a space that's roughly 1 or 2 rows of hair.

Then going into the black, I fill in where I need a bit more thickness, and places that may be empty then, I go in under my arch and do a few flicks of black to create the illusion that there are actually hairs there and that it's not just drawn in [third picture, finished]

With eyebrows I highly recommend practicing a lot. It takes a bit of work to get it down and to create a brow that looks good with your face. Also, depending on your face shape experiment with how much to arch your brow and the thickness of your brow... [I'm always playing with my eyebrow shape! Though so far this is my favourite~]

If you have very thin or sparse brows having multiple colours and filling in your brows with flicks rather than just filling them in will help aid you in creating a more believable natural brow.

I hope I covered everything I needed too...

Also, how is the new layout for pictures? Should I number pictures or is it pretty clear what I'm talking about? Are the little decorations too distracting? 

[The program I use to edit pictures just updated their software and I'm able to collage things now and have a bit more fun with it..]

<3CarisseIris