I typically alternate between powder eyeshadow or a brow cream/gel (in the pot) liner, so I haven’t used a brow pencil in awhile, though I’ve had a recent urge to try one.
— Christine
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I like Charlotte Tilbury’s eyebrow pencil as it seems thicker than most and can be used for a quick application at home or when away. My rant is if you have some light or grey hairs, you have make sure each hair is covered when using a pencil. I have nothing but raves when using eyeshadow on the brows. It’s fast and provides full coverage. Have not used gel/cream.
Rave! Nothing but good things to say. It’s a fundamental step to my routine as I have brows that start thick but get pretty sparse around the arch. Pencils help me draw in the ends of my brow in a natural way, really framing the face and keeping me looking polished. I use the ABH brow wiz and it hasn’t let me down yet.
I like that they’re just so EASY. I have fairly full brows, but a little bit of sparseness near the center that I like to fill in. I just use a cheapie brow pencil to draw a horizontal line, then use the spoolie end to brush and blend upwards. Takes about 20 seconds, and DONE.
They are my choice of brow product because of the convenience and the wide range in price — usually even the most pitiful makeup stand in a market aisle has a brow pencil. Love em!
Rant: It’s hard to find a formula that works for me. They’re usually too creamy for oily skin. If they’re not too creamy, then they are too firm and don’t transfer color. Color selection is dismal, especially for redheads.
Rave: They’re easy to use and keep in a purse.
I used to use them up until I once ran out and had to use a brown eyeshadow in a pinch. Found that it looked more natural and was so much faster to do with eyeshadow that I never went back to an eyebrow pencil!
I mostly use brow gel, as my brows mostly need taming and to have the bright white hairs colored brown like the rest. If I want to go a little bolder it’s pretty easy to add a little powder. I do have one brow pencil, that other people rave about, but I have yet to figure out what’s so great about it. I imagine it’s different if you need to draw on individual brow hairs, but then I think I would want a pencil that I could sharpen to a very fine point.
The other issue with brow products is color. It’s hard to find good, ashy, medium brown tones. It seems like most brow products are too golden, too red, or too dark compared to my own brows (although I’ve managed to find enough products in good colors to do what I need to do).
Within the past 6 mos. or so, I prefer pencils. I feel like I can get my brows done quicker and the end result is more natural than my previous routine. I used to use Dipbrow and usually powder over to tone the intensity down. I feel the pencil gives me wax and color in one. I like Urban Decay and Anastasia’s pencils.But, I think ABH gets a slight lead because with UD , I feel like I’m constantly buying them because there’s not much product in the pencil.
I am lucky enough to have nicely shaped brows naturally, but I do need to fill in a scar from an old brow piercing. I’ve found that brow pencils really don’t fill that scar very well due to the uneven skin surface.
Additionally I’m not a fan of how brow pencils make my brows feel. I like a natural, barely there feel to my makeup and the heavy wax feeling brow pencils have drives me nuts.
I like Clinique and Hourglass. They can be too hard but I like the effect when coupled with a gel. Sometimes pencil on it’s own isn’t enough or it’s too much if it’s heavy handed.
The pencil is my primary product whenever I do my brows. I find it to be much faster, and a little easier, to complete my brows with a pencil rather than a powder or gel. MAC’s [mechanical] brow pencil in SPIKED and Jordana’s FabuBrow pencil in MEDIUM BROWN makes my brow life effortless.
I have pretty full brows, so I don’t need to use much product, and I tend to stick with the Anastasia Brow Wiz as it looks really natural when I want my brows to be a bit more polished than normal.
I recently got a mini sample of the IT Cosmetics universal brow pencil and I’m actually pretty impressed with it – super easy to use, looks natural, and the metal caps actually fit securely over the spoolie and the pencil so I actually trust throwing it in my makeup bag.
I use a brow pencil as my eye brows are so pale that if I used a brow gel it could end up looking very strange indeed. The pencils are really easy to use and smudge a little, if needed.
I don’t have very much use for them, unfortunately! My brows are so sparse that I’m better off filling them in with powder or pomade, although I occasionally use them to get a cleaner line than I can with powder
My brows are light and a bit thin. My absolute favorite pencils are Laura Mercier in Blonde (light taupe) and IT Cosmetics in Universal Taupe. I like IT’S included brush.
I do use the Benefit eyebrow mascara, I don’t know what it’s actually called. It is great at keeping the crazy hairs going the same direction.
I was a brow pencil person for years but stopped about a year ago. I found that putting pressure via pencils sometimes pulled out hairs. Also, I kept breaking the brow color sticks in mechanical pencils and wasting product. Switched to Anastasia Dipbrow Pomade, occasionally following with a tinted gel to fatten up the hairs, and couldn’t be happier. Plus I get a great defining line with pomade and brush that I wouldn’t get from the pencil.
My brows are fair and have become very sparse. My desert-island-must-have is Origins Fill In the Blanks in Blonde. I’ve tried many brow pencils and other brow formulations and always come back to it.
Overplucked my eyebrows about 15 years ago and have been dependent on brow products ever since. Moved from product to product until I received a full size sample of IT Cosmetics Universal Brow Pencil. Great color and consistency. Can’t live without it. My search is over.
I’m absolutely in love with Chella’s eyebrow pencil. It’s a skinny pencil that winds up, but it only last about two months tops with regular usage! Love the product but definitely not worth the $18 price tag for the amount of product that you get… 🙁
RAVE! i love eyebrow pencils the most! i like keeping a natural look to my eyebrows so filling them in slightly does just the job for me.
I usually use pomade or powder to fill in my brows but I think I’m going to get a ABH pencil next Sephora run to give it a go since my brows are naturally thick and only need a bit of definition. The It pencil I have is pretty good, but the color is too ashy to get a true brown even when pressing harder.
I’m picky about the size and texture of the pencil product. I’m not overly fond of the wedge style pencils which I find trickier to apply, but great for covering larger areas. I prefer to use two different types of pencil for my brows: the thin mechanical style for fleshing in the shape and creating brow hairz where I don’t have them and the softer chalkier eyeshadow style pencils for filling in bare spots. Overall as someone with sparse and difficult brows, I love and rely on eyebrow pencils as an integral part of my beauty routine.
Rave! Before I did not understand the hype of eyebrow pencils, but the older I have grown, the more I have realized that my brows are somewhat short and undefined. At the moment I have tried Veluxe Brow MAC eye pencil in Deep Brunette and it is nice but it gets broken way more often than I would like so next time I will switch to the automatic eye brow pencil in Spiked – fingers cross this will be the one! 😀
I almost always pair brow pencil up with brow powder and brow gel, partially because I don’t want a super sharp brow on me so a sharpened brow pencil only help me in the very small area. With that being said, I’ve always preferred those automatic ones since the tips are generally smaller (without sharpening) than a crayon/pencil that needs manual sharpening.
I feel that if you are trying to alter the shape of your brows, i.e., “draw hairs” where you have none, you really do need a brow pencil. I’ve been following the advice of Australian MUA, Rae Morris, who is a huge advocate of of well-shaped brows in general, but that women, particularly older women should have LESS arched brows because a higher arch instantly gives us a “huge puffy eyelid that will age you considerably.” She goes on white a lot of about the importance of well-shaped eyebrows in her book “Timeless Beauty” and shows a lot of examples of poorly shaped eyebrows and how to correct them. In general, she’s a fan of full eyebrows with just a slight arch, which leads me back to your eyebrow pencil question. Since I’ve been trying to “straighten” my brows, I’ve been using a Japanese drugstore brand (can also get it on Amazon or eBay) called BCL Browlash EX in “Grayish Brown” and it’s a dual-ended pencil. One end is a brush tip with a liquid, and the other end is twist-up pencil. I use the liquid end to delineate a line straight across my arch (where I have no hairs) and also to draw in some hairs at the front end of my brows (where I over plucked them a bit) and then the pencil part to fill in the rest of the brows. Per Rae Morris’s advice, besides straightening my brows, I am also not extending the tail as long nor pointing it downwards, as I did previously, as she thinks overly long tails that point downwards drag down the eyes, which already tend to droop as one ages.