Clear brow gel

Clear brow gel does for the brows what hair gel does for the head. It is a water-based gel of film-forming polymers, often with conditioning oils or panthenol, brushed through the hairs to dry into a thin, flexible film that holds them where the brush left them. It adds no colour. Most come in a slim tube with a small spoolie in the cap, like a mascara, and several are sold for lashes and brows alike.

It is a finishing step as much as a product. On full brows that only need tidying, a clear gel can be the whole routine; on brows filled with pencil or powder it goes on last and keeps both the colour and the hairs in place. Its neighbours differ in degree. A tinted gel colours as it holds; a brow soap or wax, worked from a bar or a pot with a damp brush, grips harder and leaves more texture; brow lamination, a salon treatment, perms the hairs into place for weeks, where a gel lasts a day.

The main choice is how firmly it holds. Soft, conditioning gels groom without being noticed: the hairs keep their natural direction, and a fingertip can still move them. Medium-hold gels keep a brushed-up shape through the day. Strong, “laminating” gels, the newest kind, set the hairs straight up and flat in imitation of the salon treatment; they suit thick, unruly brows, and on fine ones can look stiff. The firmer the hold, the more a gel tends to flake or leave a white cast when too much is used, and many are now sold as flake-free.

Look at the brush as closely as the formula. A small, tightly bristled spoolie reaches the short hairs at the front of the brow; a comb-shaped or tapered brush separates and sculpts them, which suits the laminated look. Clear mascaras sold for lashes and brows usually carry a larger brush made for lashes, and hold more gently. A gel sold as waterproof needs an oil-based remover at night.

Choose clear over tinted when the brows already have the colour you want, or when you fill them with a pencil or powder you like and only need it to stay: a tinted gel brushed over a carefully matched powder can shift its colour. Very fair or grey brows are the exception. A clear gel will hold them, but leaves them as faint as it found them.

Wipe the brush on the neck of the tube until it is barely wet: excess gel is how brows end up crunchy or flaky. For a groomed, natural brow, brush the hairs up at the front, then out along the arch and the tail, the way they grow. For a brushed-up, laminated look, comb the front hairs straight up, press them flat against the brow bone with the side of the spoolie, and brush the rest up and outward before the gel sets. Then leave it alone for a minute; touched while half-dry, a gel can set cloudy and uneven.

Over pencil or powder, wait until the colour has settled and use light strokes, or the brush will lift the colour and streak it through the hairs. On stubborn brows a clear gel also works under a tinted one, as a first layer of hold. Once the hairs are brushed up, a few long ones may stand above the line of the brow; trim them with small scissors rather than pluck them, since they are part of what makes a brow look full.

Most gels come off with an ordinary cleanser or micellar water; long-wear ones need oil. Keep the cap tight so that the gel does not thicken, and replace a tube that has changed its texture or smell rather than reviving it: of mascara, the FDA warns that adding water to a dried-up tube may introduce bacteria and dilutes the preservative.^[1]

Holding hair with a clear gel is older than any product sold for the brow. In 1874 The Ugly-Girl Papers gave a recipe for bandoline, for women whose hair came out of curl while boating or riding: a quarter of an ounce of gum tragacanth left overnight in a pint of rose-water with five drops of glycerine, until it made “a smooth solution, nearly as thin as glycerine”.^[2] It says nothing of brows. What the brows got, for a long time, was a brush. In 1914 a manual published under the name of the soprano Lina Cavalieri told readers to keep their brows clean “by brushing with a tiny eyebrow brush”, and to brush them “toward the temples, training the arch to be high and piquant”.^[3]

The clear gel came into its own with the brushed-up brow. In December 2019 the British trade magazine Professional Beauty called brow lamination “the game-changing trend of 2019”: a treatment from Moscow in which the hairs are coated with a glue, combed into place and set with a perming and setting solution, coaxing them upward much as a lash lift does.^[4] Makers of clear gels answered with stronger holds and borrowed the salon’s vocabulary, so that “laminating” and “lamination effect” now appear on tubes that wash off at night. A gel cannot reshape the hair as a perm does. It can hold the same shape until evening, which is all that most brows ask.