Tinted brow gel

Tinted brow gel is brow colour carried in a clear, film-forming gel and sold like a mascara, in a slim tube with a small brush in the cap. Brushed through the brows, it coats each hair with pigment and dries to a flexible film that holds the hairs where the brush left them. Many add fine fibres, which cling to the hairs and make a sparse brow look thicker, and many ranges sell the same gel in a clear shade too.

Where pencils and powders colour the skin between the hairs, a tinted gel colours the hairs themselves. That is its strength and its limit. It darkens, thickens and sets a brow that is already there, in one sweep, but it cannot draw a hair where none grows, which is work for a pencil or a pen. A clear gel holds without colour; a pomade colours skin and hair together, and more heavily; a brow tint dyes the hairs for weeks, where a tinted gel washes off at night.

Choose the shade by the brow hairs, and when in doubt take the lighter one. The gel lies on every hair, so colour builds quickly, and a shade too dark reads as a painted stripe from across a room. Taupes and soft ash browns suit fair and light-brown brows; warm browns and auburns suit red hair; several ranges include a grey for brows that have turned, and a tinted gel is one of the easier ways to soften white hairs scattered through dark ones.

Then decide how much the gel should do. Fibre gels add the most body and suit fine or sparse brows; on thick brows the fibres can clump. Waxy gel-pomades hold more firmly and lay down deeper colour; thinner gels give a sheer tint and a softer hold. Long-wear formulas sold as waterproof or transfer-proof last through heat and sport, but need an oil-based remover at night. Look at the brush, too: a small, tapered one reaches the short hairs at the front of the brow, while a large one covers the brow quickly and is harder to keep off the skin.

Match the gel to the brow rather than to the look in the advertisement. Brows that are thick but pale often need nothing more than a sheer, fibre-free tint; sparse brows do better with a few pencil strokes in the gaps and a fibre gel over them than with either alone.

Wipe the brush on the neck of the tube; most of the mess of brow gel comes from too much of it. With the brows clean and dry, brush first against the growth, from the tail towards the nose, to coat the hairs down to the root, then back the way they grow: up at the front, out along the arch. The first pass gives colour and body, the second the shape.

Use the tip of the brush to press a little colour into sparse patches and to lift single hairs. If gel lands on the skin, lift it with a cotton bud before it dries, or it sets as a smudge. For more depth, let the first coat dry for a minute and add a second, rather than loading the brush. Over pencil or powder, a tinted gel goes on last, with a light hand, so that it does not drag the colour beneath.

Treat the tube as an eye cosmetic, because it is one. Do not pump the brush in and out, which pushes air in and dries the gel; close the cap tightly; never share it. The FDA’s advice for eye make-up is to keep it clean and not to share it, and it notes that manufacturers usually recommend discarding mascara two to four months after purchase, a sensible measure for a brow gel too.^[1]

Colouring the brows with a small wet brush is older than the tube. Nineteenth-century actors took up water cosmetique, pigment milled into soap, to colour their hair and brows, and many called it mascaro; in 1910 the actor J. E. Dodson described doing his brows with “a black water mixture known as mascaro”, put on with “a small, sort of kindergarten, toothbrush”. By 1912 the actress Lillian Russell was telling newspaper readers that mascara was “a good eyebrow and eyelash darkener”: “It is not a permanent dye, but a sort of water color.”^[2]

The fuller brow of the 2010s filled the shelf with them. In November 2014 the trade paper WWD reported that Benefit had launched Gimme Brow the year before, a tinted gel designed to add volume “with tiny fibers”; that Bobbi Brown was adding two shades to its Natural Brow Shaper & Hair Touch Up, one of them for grey and white hair; and that L’Oréal Paris would bring a fibre-infused brow gel to the mass market the next year.^[3]

In October 2015 Glossier launched Boy Brow, a gel made with beeswax and carnauba wax which NYLON found gave “a deeper, more full tint” than most gels, then “simply used to hold hair in place and add dimension with a slight tint of color”.^[4] Between them, the fibre gel and the waxy gel-pomade set the two directions tinted gels still take: bulk, or colour with hold. What the actors did with soap and a toothbrush now comes in a tube.