Brow powder

Brow powder is eyeshadow’s plainer relation: finely milled brown pigment pressed into a pan and made matte, since any shimmer on the brow reads as makeup. It is picked up on a stiff, angled brush and pressed into the skin between the brow hairs, where it clings to skin and hair alike. The result is shadow rather than line, which is why a powdered brow looks fuller without looking drawn. Many are sold as duos: a lighter shade for the front of the brow, a darker one for the arch and tail.

Among its neighbours it is the gentlest. A pencil draws lines; a pomade is waxier and more opaque, sets fast and holds the hairs; a tinted gel colours the hairs but not the skin between them. Powder fills that skin, which is exactly where a brow that is full but patchy, or fair enough to vanish in photographs, needs help. What it cannot do is draw convincing hairs where there are none, or outlast a pomade on oily skin in heat without something on top to hold it.

Match the powder to the brow hairs rather than the hair on your head, and choose in daylight. A duo makes the choice easier: the lighter shade for the front of the brow, where hairs are finest, the darker for the arch and tail, or the two blended for the middle. Ash browns and taupes suit fair, grey and most light-brown brows; cool, deep browns suit dark ones; soft auburns suit red hair. Black is too heavy for almost anyone whose brows are not black. Swatch on the back of your hand with the brush you will use, since a pan can look quite different from the colour it leaves.

The format is a matter of taste. Single pans and duos are the plainest; palettes carry several shades to mix; some powders come in a stamp, with stencils to print the shape. Many brow kits add a clear wax to set the hairs. That is a second product rather than a better powder, and worth having only if your brows need holding as well as colour.

Brush the brows up with a spoolie first. Tap the angled brush into the powder, then tap off the excess: a loaded brush is how brows come out as blocks. Start at the arch, where most brows want the most colour, and work towards the tail in short strokes that follow the hairs, pressing rather than sweeping. Come back to the front last, with only what is left on the brush, and flick upward; a hard, square front is the usual giveaway of a filled brow.

For a sharper lower edge, draw it first with a pencil, or run the flat edge of the brush along the line. To make powder last, set the brows with a clear gel afterwards, or press it over a thin layer of pomade. Some powders can be used on a damp brush for a stronger line, but only if the maker says so. Stencils give symmetry quickly; soften their edges with the spoolie afterwards, or the brows will look printed on. Wash the angled brush every week or so, since skin oil and old powder stiffen its bristles, and a stiff brush lays the colour on in stripes.

Brushing colour onto the brow is older than the powder compact. In 1874 The Ugly-Girl Papers advised that “all preparations for darkening the eyebrows” be “put on with a small hair-pencil”, the period’s name for a fine brush, because “the ‘dirty-finger’ effect is not good”; for white brows it suggested walnut juice, brushed on, “turning them to a rich brown”.^[1] By 1917 brow colour was also sold pressed into a cake: Maybelline’s product of that year was advertised as an “ideal, harmless preparation for darkening eyelashes and eyebrows”, and was used by wetting the cake and lifting the colour with a small brush.^[2]

A compact for the brow alone came later. Max Factor’s Brush & Brow Eyebrow Make-up of 1964 was advertised as “eyebrow make-up in compact form that you apply with a specially tapered brush”, promising “the softest most natural looking brows—ever—with never a hint of the penciled, the stenciled, the harsh”, in five shades that included Ash Blonde and Smoky Gray.^[3] In Britain, Eylure’s Shadobrow of the mid-1960s was sold, in charcoal, dark brown and light brown, as a “subtle way to shape and colour eyebrows with a natural look”.^[4]

As her brow line was getting off the ground, Anastasia Soare has said, she travelled to teach customers “how to use powder in your eyebrow like you use lipstick on lips or mascara on lashes”; her recollection that “there were no products on the market for eyebrows” is not borne out by the record above.^[5] Regulators, for their part, treat the brow as part of the eye. A rule of 2004 permitting a carbon black, D&C Black No. 2, in cosmetics named “brush-on-brow” products beside eyeliner, eye shadow and mascara, and quoted the legal definition of the “area of the eye”, which includes the eyebrow, together with the regulation that no colour may be used there unless its listing “specifically provides for such use”.^[6] A brow powder is, in law, an eye cosmetic.