The Five Second Brow Lift

Top to bottom: Revolution Brow Soap, e.l.f. Brow Lift, Iconic London Brow.

When you turn 50 the government should send you a beautiful cake and something for your brows.

A cake would be nice and lord knows we deserve it, having made it this far, but the brow kit is critical. Because in addition to all the nonsense that happens to our bodies around that milestone birthday, our brows can go crazy in one of two ways.

“You’ll either get wiry, coarse brows or they’ll just become finer and finer and disappear,” brow artist Maribeth Madron once told me as she tamed my wild caterpillars with her signature Rubis tweezers.

If your brows pull a disappearing act, daily use of a brow serum can give them a second chance at life. But if nature has decided to bless you with brows that have started to curl like a Toni home perm, an industrial strength brow product (favourites listed below) will rein them in and make them lay flat. Then just brush them upwards, as brows that point down can make you look like a sad clown painting. And because these brow fixes aren’t tinted, you will never look overdone (see again: sad clown), but the effect will be dramatic.

Or you can head to the salon for chemical ‘brow lamination’, but I’d much rather spend five seconds with a brush.

From Top:

1. Revolution Beauty Soap Brow, $18, Shoppers Drug Mart, is a misnomer, as this soft waxy solid is soap with shea butter to keep brows in place. A sturdy wide brush makes it easy to brush brows up and the faint scent is an added bonus.

2. e.l.f. Brow Lift clear eyebrow gel, $8, elf cosmetics.com and Shoppers Drug Mart, a wee pot of glycerin-based, clear paste, is as mighty as it is tiny. it looks like gel, but it too has a waxy texture for taming the most unruly brows. And you cannot beat the price.

3. Iconic London is a brand for flossy young influencer girls who wear a lot of makeup. Ignore all that, go to Sephora and get this slender tube of Liquid Brow Silk Max Gel, $31, Sephora.ca. The thick white lotion dries clear and holds brushed up brows in place like a champ.

Bring Those Skimpy Brows Back to Life

Around age fifty, you’ll see a photo of yourself and realize that your brows and lashes have done a slow fade, like someone turned down the contrast on your face. Bringing brows back to life is actually pretty easy and enlivens your face the way smiling or a good dose of blusher can, and no one will figure out what you’ve done. You’ll just look better rested or like you had a vacation.

Brow rescue is a two-pronged affair. Part one is brow serum, which as a former tweezer enthusiast, I can affirm does actually work to repair what youth and cluelessness put asunder. RapidBrow Eyebrow Enhancing serum, ($43, Shoppers Drug Mart) contains peptides to stimulate growth and spur those snoozing, dormant hairs on to greatness, while biotin and panthenol strengthen the age-diminished hairs themselves.

It takes a couple of months of twice daily applications to see results, so diligence is key. And you have to keep at it once your brows have returned. Some people may squawk about having to continue using brow serum, but just remember that you also need to eat food every day. You can’t just eat for a month and then never eat again, so it’s like that.

If like me, you recklessly tweezed away the little ‘fan’ hairs at the inner corners of your brows in the misguided belief that wider-set brows make eyes look wider set, (they don’t) Rapidbrow serum can bring those back. (God, all those unhelpful, ancient beauty stories that instructed you to hold a pencil beside your nose to determine where your brows should start.) Not to mention the 90s skinny brow trend that too many of us succumbed to. Even Canada’s national treasure, Celine Dion, is a cautionary tale of inner brow over-tweezing and while you could argue that that’s her look, I don’t want that for you.

Maybelline New York Tattoo Studio Longer Brow pencil in Blonde,

In the meantime, while you wait for your brows to awaken like Sleeping Beauty, you can do an artful patching job with Maybelline New York’s new Tattoo Studio Longwear brow pencil in Blonde, ($12.49, Shoppers Drug Mart.) This shape-shifting, ashy taupe ‘blonde’ shade will invisibly fill any sparse areas even if your brows are dark. It’s also magically perfect if you have some silver hairs mixed in there as well. Just apply tiny, feathery strokes to the sparse areas. Go slowly, and always step away from the mirror to see your handiwork before adding another stroke.

And Maybelline New York Tattoo Studio brow pencil claims to last 36 hours, which is longer than you’ll need, as we are now past the age of dancing all night in illegal clubs and emerging at 4:00 a.m. with our make all smudged, in search of breakfast.