We have more than a few clients who come in for a haircut not when they need a haircut, but when their eyebrows are getting out of hand. While we love seeing you gents more often, we are primarily in the business of making your life easier.
With that in mind, we’re going to teach you how to groom your eyebrows at home. You need just a few tools and a few minutes, and you’ll look more approachable and less angry. If that’s your thing. If not, keep that gloriously intimidating scowl on, friend.
Not every set of eyebrows needs this, and if yours don’t grow wild, leave them alone and go about your day, you lucky bastard. But if the natural state of your eyebrows is in the general Gandalf range, or even if you just have a few wonky tonk hairs, here’s how clean them up without looking manscaped, just like we do in the shop.
Tools of the Trade
You don’t need much to get this job done. Just three items, the first of which you should have anyway if you have any amount of hair above your neck. If you live with a lady, you can likely find the other two in her tackle box.
- A small, fine toothed comb, like a taper comb. They’re also good for grooming sideburns and general combing, so, multitasking bonus.
- A small pair of grooming scissors, manicure scissors or facial hair-specific scissors are an excellent option.
- Slant-tip tweezers. Don’t buy the absolute cheapest – they are not well aligned, and make the job way harder than it has to be.
Got everything? Let’s do this.
Unibrow Destruction
Tool: Tweezers
Even if you do nothing else to your eyebrows, getting rid of that patch in the middle is a necessity. It is a good look on literally nobody. Taking them too far in looks artificial and odd, but don’t take enough, and you might as well not have done it at all.
Get rid of all those brambles in the middle, and keep going until you get to the vertical line extending from upper bridge of your nose, pictured in white below.
Trim the Wilford Brimleys
Tools: Taper comb and facial hair scissors
Even if you don’t have the Great Wall of Unibrow across the middle of your face, most men have some hairs (or all of them) in their eyebrows that grow way the hell too long.
To fix the overgrowth, use the thin end of your taper comb and brush hairs up to the upper edge of the eyebrow. Don’t comb too hard, it will overdirect the hair, which means that when the hair falls back to its natural place, you may have bare patches at the edges. You’re looking for what we call neutral tension here. Trim the crazies only.
For most eyebrows, a little nip will make you look cleaned up, but not overly manicured. If, however, you have the eccentric grandpa or wolf man look going on with thick, dense, wiry hair that goes any way it pleases, you can take it a bit further.
After the above step, comb your eyebrows down, (again, gently, you shouldn’t have a lot of tension in the hair) until your comb reaches the bottom of your eyebrow, and snip any extra long strays.
Extra Credit
Destroy the Land Bridge
Tools: Tweezers (razor or wax will do as well)
If you are particularly sasquatch-like, you may have a furry bridge that connects the outer edge of your eyebrow straight into your hairline. You may want to get this part waxed if it is particularly bad, but you could also tweeze or even shave it – just knock it down a little bit, you’re not looking to create a new hairline or eyebrow shape.
Shear the Underbrow
Tools: Tweezers
If your eyebrows grow super low on the brow bone, extending down toward the eyelid or down onto the outer top edge of your cheekbone, feel free to get those hairs too.
For the low growers above your eyelid, tweeze just a handful of hairs to open your eyes up a little, you are not looking for an arch – that is for the ladies and the Jersey Shore.
For the cheekbone hairs, you can just shave those off or get them waxed. Don’t worry about them growing back thicker and darker, that is an old wives tale, we promise. If you shave off hair, the ends growing back might seem rougher in the first day of growing back in, but they smooth out quickly.
On the other hand, being pulled out by the root repeatedly, over a long period of time, can actually make hair thinner, lighter, and sometimes make it disappear all together.
Prep Your Skin for the Perfect Shave
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