Tweezers are the ultimate essential if you want to pluck and trim your eyebrows at home. Using the wrong ones can lead to small accidents like breaking off the brow hair you were intending to remove, or taking off more brow hair than intended. Here’s what you should look out for in a pair of tweezers:

First, the tips should be just the right width, anywhere from two to four mm is ideal. Anything too wide is unwieldy. When you squeeze the tweezer, the flat parts of the tips should be square-shaped and come together without leaving any gaps. This ensures a firm grip so you can take out the brow hairs easily. If the flattened tips are too thin, you risk snapping off the brow hair at its root.

Lastly, choose a slightly angled one so your hand is not blocking your view when you are using the tweezer, precision is important because you want to be able to pluck out your brow hairs strand by strand.

Try the Tweezerman Ultra Precision Point Tweezer, a favourite of beauty editors from all over the world. This version is coated in titanium gold so it resists corrosion (great in Singapore’s humid weather) for longer-lasting tips. $52, from Sephora.

If you’re following through with your professional brow-grooming sessions by tweezing and trimming your eyebrows every other day, then it’s easy to maintain the shape of your arch. But it’s not necessarily a priority for those who are time-starved, and so if it’s been a few weeks your brows may start getting out of shape.

Using a white eyeliner pencil to draw out your desired shape serves as a good guideline and shows you exactly where the unwanted brow hairs are so you can start tweezing them out.

Here’s an important tip: Only remove the brow hairs whose roots are growing outside of the lines. If the root is inside the line but the brow hair is too long and dips out of the line, leave it. You’ll trim off the excess length in the next step.

If you’re adept at using a brow razor, you can shave off the extra-fine brow hairs that are not-so-visible, yet harder to get out with tweezers. Maange Cosmetic has a set of eyebrow stencil, razor, and pencil available for $$7.35 on Lazada to make this process a little more beginner-friendly.

Turns out you do need a pair of scissors just for your brow hairs. As it seems, the scissors you usually reach for in the kitchen or for your children’s arts and crafts session won’t cut it. Brow hair scissors have a sharp tip for precision and are small enough to wield easily— they may or may not have curved blades (it’s your preference).

You’ll also need a spoolie brush like those found on eyebrow pencils to help you hold the brow hairs in place as you snip off the excess length. These work better than combs at holding the brow hairs in place as you trim them, and are dense enough to catch even the shortest and finest brow hairs. We like the Benefit Cosmetics Brow Defining & Blending Tool, which has custom-blended bristles with just the right stiffness for this task. $35, from Sephora.

Start from the head of your brows and use the spoolie brush to comb the brow hairs upwards and hold them in place. Snip off anything that falls out of the white line that you’ve drawn. Comb downwards and repeat. Work your way from the head of the brows to the ends.

If you are new to this, try snipping off lengths of no more than 1mm at a time and step back from the mirror to check your handiwork. It’s better to err on the side of caution and have your brows more bushy than too neat if you are not certain, remember that practice makes perfect, so once you get the hang of tweezing and trimming your brows, you’ll be able to have neat and well-groomed arches every single day.

Read Next

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Text: Kayce Teo, Additional Reporting: Yuen Yi Ying and Farisia Thang

This post was first published on November 3, 2019, and updated on May 29, 2020. 

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