How to Shape Eyebrows in Four Easy Steps, According to a Brow Expert

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Learning how to shape eyebrows may seem intimidating, but it’s fairly easy to pull off on your own with the rights steps and tools. If you’re still a bit skeptical, it’s important to note: These are not the same eyebrows you plucked away in high school. We’ve evolved from the superthin eyebrows of the ’00s—despite what the recent skinny brows resurgence may tell you—to fluffier, healthier, fuller brows that, honestly, don’t need as much work as you think.

According to Sania Vucetaj, founder of Sania’s Brow Bar in New York City, less is truly more when it comes to how to do your brows. Vucetaj, who has groomed the likes of Rihanna and Sarah Jessica Parker’s iconic brows, is all about promoting brow follicle health and tells her clients the same thing whenever they want to shape their own.

“Get rid of your magnifying mirror and get rid of bright light,” Vucetaj says. “Natural lighting only.” Zeroing in on your eyebrows will make you extra susceptible to going overboard, especially if you’re worried about tadpole brows. “It takes six months to get hairs to grow back,” she warns.

Another one of Vucetaj’s brow commandments? “No creams, no lotions, nothing around the brows,” she says. These products can flog your follicles and inhibit hair growth, so be extra cautious when applying skin care around the brow area.

Lastly, Vucetaj warns against using waxing or threading for shaping eyebrows, since both can be damaging to follicles and run the risk of removing too many hairs. “Waxing stretches the skin,” she says. “It’s the thinnest skin of the body, but also wherever the wax falls, that’s pretty much the shape. Threading, they pull the hairs in every direction and a lot of the times there’s no precision there either.”

Vucetaj has owned her tweezer-only brow bar since 2011. “With tweezing, it’s one hair at a time, as you can see. So you could actually mold the shape and sculpt it as needed. And when it’s one hair at a time, the chances of it going too far is very minimal.”

Now that you have all the essentials down, here is everything you need to know on how to shape eyebrows at home.

Step 1: Find your placementEveryone’s natural brow shape is unique to them, but there are a few guidelines you can generally follow when assessing your placement. “Your brows should always start centered with the top ridge of your nose—not the bottom, the top,” says Vucetaj. “It’s really important that you don’t separate this too much.”

The arch should always be three-fourths of the way back. An easy way to find your natural arch is by taking a finger and gently pulling the skin above your eyebrow up. “You can always lift the skin to recognize where your natural arch shape is,” Vucetaj recommends.

You can also judge how many hairs you should remove in relation to your eyes. “To find how high or low your arches should sit, you’ve got to see how much space you have from your eye to your brow,” she says. “If you have a lot of space, you want to keep the brows a little fuller. If you have very little space, you want to go higher to open up the eyes.”

For example, my arches sit high, therefore, Vucetaj advises not to tweeze my arches too much, since she wants to retain any hairs growing in to help my brows appear fuller.

Step 2: Pencil in your browsIt may sound unusual, but Vucetaj recommends penciling in your eyebrows the way you usually wear them before you start tweezing. This helps create a stencil of where you can remove hairs and areas you should leave alone. Instead of asking yourself, “Where is my arch?” or “How do I find my shape?” this can help answer your own questions.

“That could be a rabbit hole of people asking ‘How do I know?’” says Vucetaj. “You know what you’re looking for. Pencil how you normally would pencil your eyebrows or where you think you want your brows to be. Make sure that you pencil them in so that you control what you’re doing and you don’t go overboard.”

Step 3: Tweeze to balanceOnce you’ve identified the areas where you can remove hair, start tweezing. “Focus on balance and be careful with the edges of your brows,” says Vucetaj. “Do one hair at a time. Alternate tweezing hairs from one side to the other side, little by little. Few hairs here, a few hairs here, that way they keep up at the same pace.”

This is why using penciling first is so beneficial: “You prevent yourself from going too far,” she adds. “That’s the biggest mistake people make, is tweezing them freestyle without any pencil, and then you realize you lost control and you’ve overdone it.”

FYI: There is a right and wrong way to tweeze. To make sure you’re not damaging the follicle, Vucetaj recommends picking up hairs from underneath, then “pulling in the direction of the hair.”

“Again, we’re not tweezing too much,” Vucetaj reiterates. “If you miss a hair, it’s fine. You just want to make them look neat, but not perfect. I don’t believe in a perfectly sculpted brow.”

Step 4: Trim only as neededLastly, trim any long hairs with brow shaping scissors only, which are specifically designed for the area. “To trim, use a spoolie brush to hold hairs up and then just trim those little tips,” says Vucetaj. “The proper way to trim is upwards at an angle.” Once you’ve finished, Vucetaj says you can go back and tweeze “any little strays that you might’ve missed.”

“These steps are a good way to protect yourself from going too far, and keeping them natural looking.”

Sania’s Brow Bar Mechanical Brow Pencil

Sania’s Brow Bar Slant Tip Tweezers

Sania’s Brow Bar Precision Blade Scissors Sania’s Brow Bar brand

Ariana Yaptangco is the senior beauty editor at Glamour. Follow her @arianayap.