According to the beauty trend and simply what you see when you look in the mirror, brows are a BIG deal! They provide structure, dimension and expression to your face. It is imperative to keep up your brow appearance even if you want to have even the simplest of beauty routines. But in order to do this you must have some proper insight into a simple yet wonderful tool, the tweezer.
"Tweezers are one of the best beauty investments you'll ever make," says Hilary Foote, a brow expert, makeup artist and licensed esthetician with almost 20 years of experience. The self-professed Arch Empress swears by her Tweezermans and earned her royal title tweezing over 15,000 pairs of brows in 2011 alone!
If you want to step your tweezer game up, take a look at the tips below.
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Tweezer Myths
Depending on the thickness and length of each hair, this system of stretching the skin to pull out hairs one by one can be more or less painful. Often we find that redness occurs around the waxed area. This should not worry because it usually disappears shortly. One of the most used techniques to facilitate tweezing is the use of hot baths on the area to be waxed before starting to remove hairs. This will induce the opening of the pores and make the task easier. But you could be doing more damage than good if you use tweezers incorrectly.
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Another one of the most popular myths is that if you extract a hair with tweezers instead two new hairs grow. This is totally false. In fact, it is proven that often the hairs were removed with forceps not grow again (hence it is recommended not to abuse this system in some areas of the body, such as in the eyebrows ).
The Right Shape
Tweezers of both medical and cosmetic grade come in a diversity of shapes, sizes and finishes. Stainless steel is the best option to help avoid infection at the hair follicle.
"Think of tweezers like a pair of earrings—......you want to use a metal that doesn't aggravate the skin," explains Foote. "Shape-wise, stick with either a slant or pointed tip."
The most user friendly is probably the slanted tweezers, as they enable you to hold the angled edge flat against the face. This give you better visibility of what you are doing and added precision.
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Pointed tweezers come to a thin spike and are ideal for plucking fine or ingrown hairs and splinters.
Flat, rounded and square tip tweezers offer no precision and will have you plucking chunks of hair out all at once. Yikes!
The Proper How-To
If you don't know how to tweeze properly, not only could you end up looking like eyebrow-less Homer Simpson, you can cause some serious damage to your face. "The most important thing in tweezing is removing the root," says Foote. If you don't reach the ball at the end of the hair follicle, you break the hair at the thickest point of the follicle and it'll grow back appearing bushier.
Here are some pointers:
- Pull the skin between the hair follicle taut, not tight.
- Tweeze hairs parallel to the direction of their growth (pull to the right on right-sided brows, the left on left-sided brows)
- Pay attention to speed. Rapid movements equal less pain.
- If you're sensitive to pain, ice the area after you've removed all of the offending strands (hairs fall out easier with warm skin).
Visit the BlackDoctor.org Skin and Beauty center for more articles.
For more tweezer tips, visit KissTheChaos.com.
