Wedding Blog Part 2: All About Dem Brows

Brows are big business these days. Gone are the skinny caterpillar brows of the 90s, now we're all hankering after bushy, Cara Delevingne-esque brows. Unfortunately many of us are still paying the price for overplucking our brows into oblivion in our youf', and suffer from sparse, often patchy brows with uneven regrowth.

If only we'd paid heed to our mother's advice and put down our tweezers!

Trying to get my brows in order was one of my first beauty priorities after I got engaged (super important, I know!), and I've been slowly improving my skills at cheating bushier brows at home.

The first thing I did was to ban my tweezers. It was painful at first, but I knew that I had to leave my brows in the hands of the experts rather than meddling with pesky stray hairs myself. It's too easy to go overboard when you start plucking away hairs here and there, so banishing them is the only route.

It took my brows an age to grow back, and they looked absolutely terrible in the process, patchy and uneven, but it was totally worth it for the shape they have now.

My first port of call was Kim O'Sullivan's studio The Dublin Makeup Academy - who I discovered through lots of research online. 

Since I had a few threading disasters in the past where therapists thinned out my eyebrows and left them really bare, I was quite apprehensive about getting my brows done professionally. However, having looked at many, many examples of her work online, I felt Kim would be a safe pair of hands.

Kim expertly, waxes, threads, plucks and tints brows into submission - and the results are fairly impressive. Also, they don't stray into blocky, HD brows that were all the rage only too recently. 

Apart from a few brow visits at The Dublin Makeup Academy, my at-home brow routine has been quite simple. 

Since last month I've been trialling the M2 Brows Eyebrow Renewing Serum which aims to strengthen brow hairs and create fuller brows. 

I was quite sceptical when I started using the product at the start of May, but I'm now 6 weeks in and seeing results. They are not dramatic by any means, but are noticeable to me. I have two patches at the front of both brows from years of plucking the arch in the wrong place, and the hair has never regrown.

Since I've begun using the serum, which I apply nightly before going to bed, I now have baby hairs growing in the former bald patches. It's made it much easier for me to fill in my brows and I'm hoping the regrowth will continue!

There has to be a catch, of course, and here it's the eye-wateringly high price. This is €130 for a tube, so it's most definitely a luxury buy, and out of the reach of many.

That being said, if you despair over your brows on a daily basis and would pay any price to try encourage them to grow back, this could be a good option.

The other option, of course, is makeup, and it's a lot more affordable to cheat your way to fuller brows.

I rarely leave the house these days without applying some sort of brow product - and the new Benefit Brow collection has been impressing, not least because of the myriad choices they offer.

I already was a covert to their Gimme Brow (€26), a tinted gel product that contains fibres to subtly add volume and colour to your brows. There were two shades, Light and Dark, and now a third in between shade has been added. This is a super handy product as you can literally just brush on extra hair strokes, it's hard to go overboard and it really plumps up your brows.

They also have two brow pencils, my favourite of which is the Precisely, My Brow Pencil, which has a tiny tip for drawing in natural looking hair strokes. My only gripe with products with such a small tip is that the product tends to waste faster, but the control you get is much better. So it's a bit of a conundrum!

The Goof Proof Brow Pencil has a tear shaped tip so you can fill in brows quickly and with a decent amount of control. I use this when I'm in more of a hurry to get out the door.

I've also been turning to the Brow Zings kit which has a powder and a wax, along with a tiny brush tool, to fill in and tame brows. I find that powder products give a more natural finish and a softer appearance of that's your thing.

Make-up aficionados will be most drawn to the Ka-Brow! cream-gel brow colour, it's got a tiny brush in the lid, and gives a super-long lasting, waterproof finish. This is the kind of product that it can be easy to go overboard with, so a light touch is recommended.

Probably the most surprising, and yet quite clever, product from the range is the 3D-Browtones product, a small tube with a brush which you can use to draw on brow-highlights. Highlights for your brows, well I've heard of everything now! But this does add extra dimension to your brows, so I have to give Benefit kudos for staying ahead of the game with this one.

The range also has a conditioning primer, invisible setting gel and a new-and-improved High Brow to add a bit of gleam to those brows.

On the high street, there are some other more affordable, and extremely effective, brow products such as the Rimmel Professional Eye Brow Pencil, the L'Oreal Brow Artist Sculpt and the Maybelline Master Sleek Brow Mascara - so it's worth shopping around to see what you like working with best.

All in all I feel like my brows have come on leaps and bounds since I've started paying them proper attention and I'm excited to see how they get on in the next few months! I find that applying makeup is about a million times easier now I don't have to worry too much about evening out my brows and filling in patches, so the extra TLC has been well worth it.

This is a #nomakeupselfie in which I am, for once, pretty happy with how my skin and brows are looking, sans layers of product. I feel like my skincare and brow routine are paying off, and will definitely try and keep up the effort, even after our Big Day has passed!