“As a fresh 50-year-old, I’m pretty well versed in the demographic. I have a lot of older clients, and I hear it all,” says brow expert Michele Holmes of Michele Holmes Studio.
Holmes, who in a prior life had a career in the action sports industry, took her hobby of doing eyebrows professional in 2009. After the founder of cult-skincare brand Vintner’s Daughter became a client, word of her talents spread. A subsequent write-up in the San Francisco Chronicle (she was dubbed the “eyebrow whisperer”) drove so much business her way that she opened her own studio. Now Holmes has two locations and seven employees. “When they say that kind of stuff happens, you don’t believe it, but it actually happens,” she says of her success. “I’ve been with people through marriages, divorces, all the life events. When you touch people’s faces, you connect with them. And it’s just the most fun. Honestly, I can’t imagine doing anything else.”
I called Holmes up to ask her all about eyebrow tending, and we spoke about over-plucked ones and the thick and bushy. For an eyebrow novice like me, the conversation was a little shocking. There’s so much I didn’t know. It dropped me into an entirely new world full of brush-on hair growth serums and tiny straightening treatments.
An edited and condensed version of our conversation – about what sort of gels or other products we should know about, and what happens specifically to our eyebrows as we age – is below.
What do women in their 40s and up come in wanting help with?
Hair loss and pigment loss. As we age, most clients start to lose the density in the tails of their eyebrows – the back half, from the arch down to the outer corner of their eye. It can feel drastic because it’s not framing the entire eye. You’ve got the front of your eyebrow, which is really dense and nice, and then your tail sort of drifts off, so the balance isn’t there. And we don’t have as much tail hair to begin with. We tint the eyebrows to try to make that hair stand out again, or recommend a hair-growth product to try to grow it back.
With color loss, people start going gray overall or they’ll develop a few thick white hairs. When those start to come in and they increase in number, it looks like you’re missing your eyebrows, but it’s just pigment loss. When you tint those hairs, it makes your eyebrows look like they came back.
How long does that last?
A traditional brow tint is very gentle, because our brow hair is fragile, and it’s going to last maybe four to five weeks. (White and gray hair are also very resistant to tint.) We’ll find a product that you can brush on in between appointments.
Can you tell me about hair-growth products?
There are prescription-based ones, but we don’t recommend those for brows because you’ll get a lot of length instead of true follicle regeneration and growth.
If you tug on a hair for your entire life, eventually your follicle says, hey, the cells are getting weak and we don’t want to produce another hair. In a healthy follicle, you’re going to get a hair that’s through the skin, and then a hair that’s just sitting below the surface. And when the hair below the surface pushes out the dead keratin, the new one’s there. You’ve got a constant cycle of growth. But when you wax, thread, or tweeze forever and ever, eventually some of those give out.
Hormone-based growth serums stimulate the follicle to grow hairs again. You could do something like GrandeBrow, which is pretty cost-effective. It is good, it works. It has enough of the active ingredient, which is called prostaglandin. Prostaglandin is the hormone that produces hair and helps pump the hair out. Then there’s RevitaBrow, which has a pretty high dose of prostaglandins, and Obagi, which is newer to the market, but we’re seeing a lot of success with in every age group.
When it comes to prescription, it’s Allergan [products], but we don’t recommend those for brows because again, you’re just going to get a lot of length and you’re not going to see the baby growth, the new growth, that we want to see long-term. The brow-specific ones might tone the prostaglandins down a bit, so you’re getting slower growth and you kind of nurture your little brow plants.
A lot of people are sensitive to prostaglandin and cannot use it. You will know immediately – you get an itchy, burning sensation. Some people are very highly sensitive to Latisse. You could use something natural; you’re looking for peptides.
There’s a newer peptide hair growth thing. It’s called Myristoyl Pentapeptide-17. That’s for people who are scared to go down that hormone path and people that shouldn’t. If you’re pregnant or breastfeeding, it’s better not to use hormone-based things. I’m not a doctor; most doctors will probably say it is safe. But because prostaglandin is also the hormone that jumpstarts labor, we tend to tell pregnant people to stay away from those things.
“When my brow fades out or when I don’t have my tinted brow gels on, I look one note, like I’m all forehead.”
If you grew up in the ‘80s and ‘90s, there’s a chance you over-plucked your eyebrows. If you thinned out your eyebrows years ago, what are your options now?
If growth serums don’t work, we will have you try a different one for three months. If that doesn’t work, we start to talk about makeup, and if that is too much work for somebody, then we can talk about permanent makeup: microblading, nano brows, machine-drawn hairs, that kind of thing. But that’s the last resort. I try not to have people do that because it is such a big commitment; you have to keep going back, and the look isn’t always what people anticipate it’s going to be.
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This whole microblading craze came out, and even I jumped on it thinking, wow, this is going to be God’s gift to everybody’s eyebrows. I did eight months of training and practiced for a year and then started doing it for my clients. And I saw that it was damaging people’s skin, and so I stopped. If you start doing it all the time, you’re going to build up scar tissue. And then, the hair that you do have left eventually won’t be able to grow through the skin because you’re thickening it so much.
The other thing that people don’t understand is, ink separates under the skin. Your body’s going to start to absorb these inks, and they might absorb different colors first, or some colors might fade out first. You’re left with these weird sort of ashy blue tones in your skin, or reddish, like burgundy. It’s unpredictable. I caution people to really do their research before they get into that.
Say you have decently thick brows, but you’re still interested in what you could do to make them frame your face a little bit better.
You have to take into account: Is the size of my brow the right size for my face? Do I need to have some maintenance? Do I need shaping? Do I need trimming? Do I need makeup? Do I need pencil? A professional can help you find the right shape and the right color.
As hair color changes, people start to wonder – do I need to change the tone of my brows to match my hair because my hair is going gray? Or do I need to bring them out more, because I’m looking washed out? I see it on myself. When my brow fades out or when I don’t have my tinted brow gels on, I look one note, like I’m all forehead.
As we age, it’s important to consider the big picture. I get some ladies in here that go completely white and they’re like, I don’t know what to do, I used to have black hair and my eyebrows are still black. Should I tone them down? There’s an overall reassessment of the face as a whole.
Can you fill me in on what is popular? Because I see people doing these things online, like this thing where their brows are gelled upwards.
A brow lamination or a brow lift? Brow lamination is a chemical process that changes the bond of the hair structure. Think about it like a perm, or a relaxing treatment. It’s a straightening treatment for your eyebrows. We put a chemical on your brow and it makes your hair stand straight up. With lamination, we can make your eyebrows appear as if they’re taller, wider, and more lifted. I do it to myself. It makes it look like my eyebrows are bigger and fluffier, like I’ve had Botox or an eye lift with just this chemical process. It lasts about two months.
I actually really love it. I’m definitely in the camp of heck-to-the-yes. If you’re a good candidate for a brow lamination, you should try it once just to see if you like it. Young girls are doing it because there’s this big, fluffy eyebrow trend. It’s a good thing to do if you have really curly hair. A lot of people have curly eyebrows and they just don’t know how to tame ’em. And brow gels aren’t strong enough. It makes it a lot easier to work with your eyebrows and get them to lay where you want them to lay.
What kind of at-home products do you recommend for eyebrow novices? Do you recommend pencils? Gels?
A tinted brow gel will do a little gray coverage, and it’s going to give you a boost of color in minutes. It’s easy and anybody can do it.
If you want to fill holes, a pencil and a gel is a favorable product pairing, because those things will also keep you looking kind of natural. I’m in northern California, and my clientele here is pretty low maintenance. They just want to enhance what they already have.
My philosophy is: If you are trying to fill them into a shape and make a stencil on your face, it’s actually aging and it makes your brows look more dissimilar, because if they’re not exactly perfect, you’re going to see the problems. And it’s almost impossible to get it to stay like that.
What other issues are common for women who are over the age of 40?
As we age, we lose elasticity in our skin, so our brow position may sit lower. Lamination is good for that, but also you can tweeze under the arch a little more. We will gently adjust the shape without taking too much hair off, just to give a bit of a lift. Then I show people how to use strong-hold brow gel products to keep their brows brushed up.
What sort of general guidance would you give to someone shopping for a brow gel?
Think about your hair texture. Is it thick? Is it thin? Then, think about your hair issues. Are you trying to get more three-dimensional fill? It’s like mascara. Sometimes you want longer lashes. Sometimes you want thicker lashes. You’ve got your sheer brow gels that give a kiss of color, and then you’ve got your brow gels that are more for 3D fill — so thickening, fluffy, and overall bulk. Some even have fibers in them. If you have thick, dense hair, you would not want to use a thickening brow gel. You would go for a sheer with a kiss of color. For a wispy brow, you might want some 3D fill.
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Then, there’s hold. A lot of people don’t like the way their brows feel when they’re really stiff. So a creamy brow gel would be for them. It’ll give you a bit of hold, but it won’t make your brows feel crunchy. Some of the sheer ones are more crunchy. It’s just personal preference; you have to read the descriptions.
For clients who are price conscious, I really like Arches & Halos. I tend to lean towards smaller brands, indie brands. I like Troy Surratt; he was the very first person to come out with a refillable brow pencil.
Credo is a fun place to shop because everything’s been ethically sourced, and in order to be a brand in their consortium, you have to jump through a lot of hoops. Everything there has been tried and vetted, and also all of your lab paperwork has to be submitted to get in there. It’s clean, it’s cruelty free, there’s no greenwashing.
Just try a few things. You’ll see the difference immediately.