GIVE YOUR FACE A LIFT WITHOUT USING BOTOX OR FILLERS
An eyebrow trend inspired by Audrey Hepburn has become all the rage, Lisa Armstrong writes.
It’s Russian roulette when it comes to taking maternal advice. In regards to eyebrows, however, my mother’s was impeccable. Do not over-pluck, she counselled. They will NEVER grow back.
Strictly speaking, this is not always true. Even at the time I wondered if it was one of her lies, like the ones she told my sisters and me about S.E.X. (She actually handed me a 1928 book on the subject that threatened hell and damnation to all those who veered off the straight and narrow.)
But given how rarely — i.e. never — she proffered style advice, I decided not to dismiss her brow lore out of hand. Because she was generally right about that kind of stuff. The time she told me not to despair when girls at school teased me for having rubber lips (minuscule, skinny bow lips were in at the time) because Brigitte Bardot had inflatables, too, and was a S.E.X. symbol, comes to mind. So even though spindly, Gloria Swanson-drawn arches were all the rage in that moment and caterpillars like mine just seemed so messy, I listened to my mother. And boy am I grateful, because five minutes later, or thereabouts, Brooke Shields and her mega-slugs were the acme of beauty.
I bet Kate Moss wished she’d been given the same advice. I interviewed her early in her career, just after she’d been photographed for U.S. Harper’s Bazaar — and they’d plucked out all, yes all, of her brows. Where was the duty of care for models then, you may well ask. Kate’s did grow back, but I’ve just checked, and they’re very thin. So, there you go. Maternal wisdom cannot be surpassed when it comes to brows.
This is important stuff because, as we all know, strong brows shapeth the face, lifteth the eyes and maketh the face look less hard and brittle. Any changes you make to them should be delicately done and, ideally, reversible.
I’m not exaggerating about the shaping and the lifting. I’ve tried a bit of Botox above the brows. It’s effective if administered with a light hand. But now that I’ve done the eyebrow contouring, I’d say it’s a close thing as to which makes the bigger, or at least the more natural-looking, difference. You can get startling (and startled-looking) effects with Botox, but there’s no harm in trying a chemical-free approach, especially one called “The Audrey Brow.”
I was skeptical at first. Audrey Hepburn had a very specific look. The brow we best know her for, circa 1956, is very thick toward the bridge of her nose and then, tadpole-like, tapers off almost horizontally before executing a neat little upward hurrah at the end. Closer inspection reveals she experimented with many brow shapes over time, adapting to changing contours and follicular abundance. In her 60s, her brows had slimmed considerably, were a less exaggerated shape and were lighter. In other words, stay on top of brow trends to look current, but don’t let them take your brows hostage. We all know women who have over-waxed and over-pencilled for years, sometimes decades, and it can lend an eerie, just-emerged-from-the-attic cast to faces.
The key is to adapt. The Audrey Brow, as administered by one London salon, consists of threading, plucking, tinting and infilling (their term for pencilling, a word banned within their walls as it conjures up all sorts of scarily artificiallooking brows).
There’s nothing artificial about their approach.
Rubina, the brow-meister, appraised my bone structure and brows (still pretty thick but not as Brooke Shields as they once were), and concluded that The Audrey would work on me. To be honest, I’m sure there’s a version of Audrey that would work on anyone, however bushy their brows (for those who have lost all theirs, there is microblading, a semi-permanent form of tattooing that implants hairlike strokes of pigment under the skin. Done well, the effects are hyper-convincing). For me, Rubina said she’d do the classic Audrey that tilts up at the ends. That would entail shortening the ends of my brows at the outer corners of my eyes, but the results would be uplifting. Can you take away but make it look like you’ve added? “Of course,” she responded airily. And she did.
The modus operandi is light. The tint was left on for seconds. The immediate effect was still quite powerful, shall we say, but by the next day it looked fine. There was a bit of plucking between brows, but nothing excruciating. Rubina didn’t thread above my brows — that would look too sharp — and the pencilling (sorry, infilling) was so subtle even I couldn’t detect it. She then used her pencil to trace a very soft line along the outer bottom edge of my brows. It sounds alarming, but again, the effect was natural. Then came a matte Brow Lift highlighter crayon to accentuate the arch ... and after about 20 minutes, we were done.
A week later they still look impeccable — although not exactly Audrey. That would be spooky.
Implausible as it sounds, the new brows take five years off my face. Even without makeup, my features have more definition. More importantly, I reckon I can maintain them myself, with only occasional check-ins with Rubina. That was money well spent — I’ve checked this with my mother.