Beauty bible

Don’t meddle, make the best of what you were born with

Making the best of your brows

DO YOU HAVE fashion brows? Are they consistently, heroically, podium-ready? Do their length and style fluctuate in accordance with the looks on Gucci’s runway, Rihanna’s latest video or the popularity of Frida Kahlo exhibitions exploring the ‘conceptual’ importance of the unibrow? If the answer to any of these is ‘yes’, you are officially (and I mean this in the nicest possible way) an absurd human being.

There’s a second possibility: you may be a child. As a 13-year-old, I remember staring in consternation at the magazine headline ‘Bums Are Back!’ and trying to decipher how severe the implications were. Did it mean to say that day after day I’d been blithely wandering around with a bum when the whole time they’d been out, passé, sooo last season? Why did nobody tell me? And was this a better or worse faux pas than tucking your skirt into your knickers?

Decades on I have understood a few things. One of them is that body parts and facial features can’t go in and out of fashion and, for that reason, should never be overly styled (Kim Kardashian, take note). They can, however, be enhanced: tidied, shaped (gently – no Olivia Wilde peaks unless they were implicit to begin with), tinted (fantastic for those with sparse or bald-patched brows), stimulated (Revitabrow by Revitalash, £54.49, will have the over- plucked back to their best in no time; amazon.co.uk) or groomed, with some of the brilliant new products below.

But always bear in mind the words of ‘Brow Queen’ Shavata: ‘If in doubt, step away from the tweezers.’ And this: the eyebrows you were born with are, on balance, likely to be pretty much the right shade, thickness and shape for your face. Any drastic departures into fashion-land might provide instant titillation but will leave you stuck in a world of growing-out hell within two weeks. And frankly, that will serve you right.