****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
I have made some terrible decisions regarding my eyebrows. First, I was a teenager in the 90s and believed that by vigorously and painfully thinning them, I could looking like Drew Barrymore, (who was trying to look like Edith Piaf), in those Guess ads. It made a lot more sense back then. As the 90s waned, I continued to pluck and thin my brows because I was addicted to it. I also hated my natural shape, which was thick, asymmetrical and unruly. I was convinced that my droopy brows made me look sad and old. I kept removing more and more, filling and shaping them with a pencil. By the mid 2000s I sported half brows, which I liked because I could draw the exact shape I wanted, but also hated because I looked crazy when I wasn't wearing makeup. And even though I liked it, drawing brows is hard and time consuming, and I'm pretty sure I looked more like a Picasso than a Rembrandt. Also, the products sucked...they looked crayonish, too pigmented, too warm or too ashy, and they weren't waterproof or smudge proof. I worried incessantly about sweating them off or smearing brow pencil all over my face. When microblading hit the Internet in the aughts, I was OBSESSED. I spent years researching the procedure and fantasized way too much about rocking perfect, beautiful, permanent brows. When I finally chose the artist to perform this miracle, I found myself four hours away in a stranger's basement. I should have ran, but his website was full of beautiful transformations and I wanted to believe this could happen to me. I came out with Bert and Ernie brows and sobbed the entire car ride home. I threw TCA acid on them as soon as they healed enough to peel them off. I then found another expert who promised me she could remove them. She told me it would hurt and it did, but I was desperate enough to not care. Her procedure left me with permanent scars. She tried to tattoo over it all, twice, but my skin wouldn't take the ink. So, I found yet another professional who was convinced she could fix it. She had the grace to tell me that it wasn't my brows that caused the problem: my whole FACE was asymmetrical, and she would have to give try to correct this by giving me two different size brows. I begged her to give me a powder brow tattoo because microblading had failed on my skin twice before, but she promptly told me that those other permanent makeup professionals were untalented hacks. She was convinced her procedure would work. She laid me down, stuck her thumb into my eyeball and pushed so hard I was afraid it would explode, and began to cut me. This procedure is no joke--they use a scalpels. Somehow I came out of it with my eyeballs intact, and proceeded to follow the strict directives that promised to retain the pigment. Perhaps not surprisingly, it failed. I returned to the eyeball crusher who, in the span of a few weeks, had no recollection of me. She had to look me up in her appointment book before she would believe that she had done any work on me. She then declared that the procedure hadn't worked because in the course of my eyebrow trauma I had lost all the collagen in my skin. WTF. That was my final attempt to sport perfect eyebrows. I decided I just wanted to look normal and began the decade long search for the best product to create brows. I tried them all--pencils, pomades, gels, but nothing looked soft and realistic, and even worse, nothing stayed in place. I used Anastasia pomade for years, but lamented the smudge. I found this powder on a whim and had rock bottom expectations. Everything else had failed me, and here was an affordable and not exactly famous product on Amazon. Still, we all know how easy it is to press a button and buy something that might solve a problem, and so I did. I have to say, I am stunned by this powder. A tiny bit goes a long way. It is soft. The color palette allows you to blend the perfect shade. It is not too warm or too cool. It does not smudge. Now, I despise the silly stencils that came with it, and I want everyone to know that if stencils are your thing, buy another set because these suck. They are too square, and then too round and they aren't enough size and style options. Still, who cares?! The product is the best I've ever used and I sincerely hope they never stop making it. I might buy it five times a year to stock up for life.
