This will raise a few eyebrows – I visited a tattoo parlour again
Dame Helen did not think she would go back but the idea of saving time in the morning was irresistible
NOT long ago, she joked that she was “utterly disgusted” with her own oncecontroversial tattoo after body art became so “completely mainstream”.
But Dame Helen Mirren has ventured back into the parlour for a good cause: saving time in the morning.
The Oscar-winning actress, often lauded for her natural beauty at 72, has disclosed she has had eyebrows tattooed on in a move she has said makes a “huge difference” to her appearance.
The increasingly popular tattoos see individual hair strokes lightly drawn in semi-permanent ink to give realisticlooking eyebrows to frame the face without reapplying a pencil, powder or gel each day. “I’ll tell you what I had done recently, which I love – I got my eyebrows tattooed,” Dame Helen reported in a newspaper.
“I was fed up of my brows barely being there and when one of my girlfriends got it done, I thought that they looked great. They’re very lightly and delicately done – but it means that when I get up in the morning and I have no make-up on, at least I have eyebrows. It’s made a huge difference.”
Dame Helen, face of beauty brand L’oreal, has become a prominent advocate for older women, famously insisting her photographs are not excessively enhanced.
In 2016, she said she had begun to pay more attention to her eyebrows after playing the Queen on stage in The Audience. “I don’t think the Queen has ever touched them,” she said then. “She’s got quite present eyebrows. So when I was making myself up as the Queen I thought, ‘Oh, that’s actually quite an interesting look’.”
Dame Helen already had one small tattoo on her hand, a symbol acquired while “very drunk” with friends during an acting job on an American Indian reservation intended to denote “love thy neighbour”. Saying she has “never regretted it”, she told The Telegraph in 2003: “I’ve always been very happy about my tattoo. But back then, only prisoners, sailors and Hell’s Angels got tattooed.
“Now it’s gone madly out of control. Even Republican senators have them.”
Years later, as tattoos became even more common, she joked: “I decided to get a tattoo because it was the most shocking thing I could think of doing.
“And now I’m utterly disgusted and shocked because it’s become completely mainstream, which is unacceptable to me.”
In 2015, a poll by the British Association of Beauty Therapy and Cosmetology found women spend an average £200 per year on eyebrow grooming.
Tattooing techniques such as microblading cost hundreds of pounds and usually require several sessions to complete. The cosmetic procedure has side effects including bruising and swelling.
Of her approach to make-up as she has aged, Dame Helen has previously said: “I think we get stuck with a look, particularly when we get older. We forget that you can experiment. It’s not the end of the world – you can always wipe it off again.
“The irony is that the older you get, the less you care. I think, ‘God, when I was young, and probably had much better skin, I wouldn’t dream of going out without mascara.’”
‘I was fed up of my brows barely being there and when one of my girlfriends got it done I thought that they looked great’