ASK SOPHIE

ELLE’S beauty director answers your questions. This month: eyebrows

Q

I’m confused about what I should be doing with my eyebrows. This year, I’ve heard talk of feathering, bleaching and barbed brows, and I’m getting mixed messages about trends. I don’t want to commit to one I’m going to regret. Christina, London

A

Well now, this is a serious issue. Particularly for Leonardo DiCaprio, who flew his ‘eyebrow artist’ 7,500 miles across the world to cultivate his for the Oscars. That ended up being fake news, but the job does exist, and Leo’s is called Sharon-Lee Hamilton. In these times of self-assurance, be your own artist, but know this: it takes practice. I only realised

I’d been doing mine all wrong when I bumped into a model I’d previously worked with. ‘Sophie!’ she said. ‘We did that beautiful shoot. You look so different without those crazy, red brows – they were cool!’ Crazy cool.

I’d been using a chestnut-coloured pencil when it should have been mocha. I’m here to tell you to tread carefully when considering brows and trends in the same sentence. If the internet is to be believed, right now you should be creating a centre parting (horizontally) through your brows and brushing them above and below. It looks good on precisely nobody. You could dip a toe into the barbed-wire brows trend (alternating up and down ‘barbs’ of hair) – or take my advice and don’t. Feathered brows, bleached brows, low brow. Start here: is your face crying out for more definition? When you look in the mirror, do you feel as if you need to pile on eye make-up to give your face structure? Actually, you probably need to define your brows. There’s no denying there is a trend for brows in capital letters (Cara Delevingne, and so on), but it’s still going because bold brows look beautiful. Mine aren’t naturally fat, but I get them waxed and tinted (the biggest difference you can make to your brows, according to resident best ELLE brows owner Joely Walker) into a classic arch (chunky base, tapering to a fine tail), then I up the ante with a pencil, to mimic natural hairs, concentrating the colour at the arch, then brushing to disperse and blend the product to make the brows look fluffier. Voilà, the only trend you need to worry about – the defining one, if you will. I got a compliment on a totally unrelated Insta Story: ‘I love your eyebrow shape.’ I’ve made it! Brow graduate with honours. Until we’re meant to do the Nineties thin thing again.