Back to Basics: Brows

1. Tweezers :P Used in moderation and never while inebriated. Mine have a spring in the middle that does all the gripping for you, from a Japanese drugstore. I prefer angled tips to straight or really tiny pointy ones.

2. Shu Uemura 6OB badger brush -- very firm, with short hairs, and much finer and smaller than any other brow brush I've seen [some comparisons here], it's actually mainly sold as an eyeliner brush. Excellent for flicking on really precise, thin lines, naturally tapering at the tip (the hairs get finer and less loosely packed at the longer tip) -- i.e. just like natural brow hairs -- and works with gels as well as powders

3. Spoolie. Essential for making brow products look more like brow / less like product -- you wouldn't pack on eyeshadow without blending at least the edges, right? And even without colour products, a spoolie's necessary to give my wayward sprouting-in-all-directions brows a neater appearance. This one's actually a GWP from Suqqu (stop laughing :P), and while its bristles are finer and more varied in shape/size, and the whole shebang lasts longer than cheap unbranded spoolies (mine's survived daily use for 3 years and counting), I couldn't exactly recommend shelling out for it. It's not even angled!

4. Suqqu Eyebrow Powder 02 (discontinued). Suqqu used to make five single shades of eyebrow powder (dryish, densely packed shades of greyed black, olive and brown). This was their ashiest dark brown (cooler than any of the browns in either of their current eyebrow palettes).

5. + 6. Shu Uemura H9 Hard Formula Brow Pencil 02 Seal Brown and 05 Stone Grey -- deservedly cult products, and the ones I reach for when in need of a quick, one-product, my-brows-but-better look. There's a lot of guff talked about these, but really, it's hardly rocket science. They're hard-textured pencils which dispense colour very lightly (no risk of a sharpie effect) and work just as well sharpened to a regular pencil point as to the angled 'Shu' slice. Oils on existing hairs (or skincare/base products in that area) will help to release more colour, but they'll still work to fill in genuinely sparse areas -- as you'll see below, they swatch just fine onto paper. One thing is true, however -- one pencil will last years of daily use.

7. + 8. Suqqu Eyebrow Liquid Pen 01 Moss Green and 02 Brown I mostly reserve for the tiny bald patch in the middle of my left brow, and to extend the very tail ends of both i.e. places where I have no hair with which to 'blend in' powder or pencil strokes. Using these alone takes a bit too long for a brow-imperfectionist like me -- you're essentially drawing on a myriad on baby-fine hairs one by one -- but if you happen to have the time/patience and want/need something extremely precise whose results that mimic the natural colour, sheen and even texture of real brow hair, then I highly recommend these. Having tried a handful of cheaper offerings from Japanese and Western brands, the Suqqu pens stand out for me not only in their carefully balanced cool shades, but in the fine brush tip that dispenses a moderate but even flow of pigment without flooding or skipping. Maybe it's just bad luck, but the few Japanese drugstore pens which equal Suqqu on these two counts (and share their water- and oil-proof indelibility) have all dried out or become otherwise unreliable (flaky/crumbly formula or faded in colour) after about two months; the Suqqu pens have stayed perfectly reliably consistent since I purchased them last winter -- my Moss Green is still going strong, and my Brown has (which sees much more frequent -- almost daily -- use) only just run out of juice (repurchased during Selfridge's Black Friday promo).

9. Rouge Bunny Rouge Eye Gloss I don't often quote RBR copy (the blog's already verbose enough without their dose of purple) but this one really does what it says on the tin site: 

I also don't often use this on brows, preferring to err on the side of under- than over-groomed, and preferring the eye gloss itself as a minimalist eyelid wash or purely textural highlighter, but when a modicum of extra polish is wanted this is my product of choice -- any other kind of gel/liquid/wax 'holding' product on my brows adds far too much texture (more often than not crunch) to justify their grooming effects for me -- the RBR gloss adds a very natural gleam and offers gentle hold with no weight (flattening brows unnaturally into the skin) or hardness. And it's not going to rain down brown/black flakes when you sneeze, either. :P

Time to see some of these in action! You'll also have noted that I have two shades of both the Shu pencils and Suqqu pens -- this is because I often lighten my brows to match my (almost invariable lightened and warmed-up) hair so tend to transition from one, through a blend/combination of the two, to the other. Matching / naturalism aside, I also switch between them to harmonise or contrast with either cooler or warmer looks e.g. see Seal Brown, Stone Grey, and a mix of the two used in the three looks here.

On white paper

My everyday routine consists of just one product. Here's an example during a cooler brow month with the Shu pencil.

1. Bare but spoolied

3. Spoolie again, to blend and soften