Brow pencil

A brow pencil is the plainest of brow tools: a core of waxes, powder and pigment inside a wooden casing, sharpened like any other pencil. The core is firmer and drier than an eye pencil’s, so that it holds a point and leaves a matte line rather than a creamy one, and many carry a spoolie brush on the cap or at the other end. The name covers a range of textures. Some pencils are hard and waxy, made to be sharpened to a fine or flat edge for hair strokes; others are sold as powder pencils, soft enough to shade like a brow powder.

Against its neighbours, it is the generalist. A micro pencil twists up from a barrel with a lead too fine to shade with; a powder fills softly but will not draw a crisp edge; a pomade does both but sets quickly and is easily overdone. A wooden pencil can be kept sharp for strokes or worn blunt for shading, and because it is sharpened rather than twisted up, a clean, fresh point is only ever a turn of the sharpener away.

Decide first how firm you want it. A hard pencil draws the finest, most hair-like strokes and hardly smudges, but needs a light hand and some practice; a soft or powdery one fills quickly and looks diffused, which suits sparse brows that need colour more than detail. Waterproof formulas help on oily skin and in heat. For shade, match the brow hairs rather than the hair on your head, and if you are between two, choose the lighter and cooler: a pencil laid on bare skin reads darker than the brow around it.

Sharpen before every use. The point wears quickly, and a fresh surface is cleaner as well as finer. Use a sharpener the size of the pencil, turn the pencil rather than the sharpener, and put a soft pencil in the fridge for ten minutes first if its core crumbles or smears. Some hard pencils are sharpened to a flat, chisel-like edge instead of a cone, so that the flat side shades and the edge draws. Wipe the sharpener’s blade now and then, since it carries wax from one pencil to the next.

Map the brow before you draw it. The front usually begins above the inner corner of the eye, the arch sits a little beyond the centre of the eye, and the tail ends on a line from the side of the nose past the outer corner. Brush the hairs up with the spoolie, then draw a light line along the lower edge, from below the arch to the tail; the lower edge is what the eye reads as the brow’s shape.

Fill the gaps above that line with short, feathery strokes in the direction the hairs grow, pressing lightly. Keep the front softest, with a few upward strokes rather than a hard block, and let the colour gather towards the arch and tail. Brush through with the spoolie to soften any line that looks drawn, and set the hairs with a clear gel if they need holding. From arm’s length the brow should look like a shadow of hair, not a stripe.

Three mistakes account for most brows that look drawn on. The first is a shade too dark. The second is a hard outline, above all around the front, which should fade into the skin rather than stop. The third is a tail pulled down or out beyond the line from nose to eye, which drags the whole face with it. Work on both brows in turn rather than finishing one before starting the other; it is far easier to keep them alike.

Pencils for the brow were on sale long before they were ordinary. In 1874 an American beauty manual, The Ugly-Girl Papers, listed “eyebrow pencils” among the toilet preparations it found advertised. The same book reported that in the fashionable toilet establishments of London brows had every unnecessary hair removed and were “thinned to the penciled line they form in the portraits of Venetian ladies”, and told its reader that bushy brows were “a most unfeminine trait”.^[1]

Between the wars, large makers took up the eyebrow pencil. The German maker Schwan-Bleistift-Fabrik began making eyebrow pencils in 1927,^[2] and Maybelline added them, in black and brown, in 1929.^[3] Tweezers were sold beside them. In 1930 the Kurlash Company of Rochester, New York, brought out the Tweezette, “the automatic, painless tweezers that make it so simple to keep your brows well groomed”; by 1937 at the latest it made an eyebrow pencil too, and its grooming kit of 1939 packed tweezers and an eyebrow pencil in the same bag.^[4] One tool took hairs away and the other drew them back.

The range of shades widened after the Second World War. In 1953 the British firm Eylure was importing Tru-Tone Eyebrow Pencils from Schwan’s American subsidiary, sold as “supersoft in 16 fascinating shades”,^[2] where Maybelline had begun with black and brown.^[3] The wooden pencil has changed little since. The brow drawn with it has changed completely, which is why the same tool serves someone copying a period arch and someone filling out a full modern brow.