Perhaps you stood in front of the bathroom mirror for just a little too long with a pair of tweezers, and wound up over-plucking. Perhaps you applied a wax strip incorrectly, resulting in half a brow vanishing off the face of… well, off your face, I guess. Or perhaps a trusted professional interpreted your brow-shaping request of “only wax underneath, I like the volume on top” as “90s strip brows are back in, so gimme”.

Whatever the cause, your prized brows are no longer full and fluffy. Instead, they are quite literally a shadow of their former selves. And I feel your pain, dear readers, as I recently suffered a brow-based nightmare of my very own.

I go to the same salon to get my brows dyed and waxed every four weeks. However, I usually see a different beautician every time, which means I’m always careful to be crystal clear about what I want from my brow appointment

Personally, I’m a fan of a beautifully wild brow. I prefer not to use pencils or liners, but to dye them to the right colour and then brush ‘em up as big as possible to create a fluffy shape. I call it a ‘more is more’ look – but done as naturally as possible, if that makes sense.

For this reason, I prefer my waxer not to touch the top of eyebrows at all, asking them to focus solely on removing the thin, blonde hairs from between my brows and top of my eyelids.

Unfortunately, during my most recent appointment there was a teeny, tiny crossing of wires which resulted in the beautician taking out a lot of the volume above my brows. As I’m sure you understand, it was a hard blow to take. Looking in the mirror something just didn’t feel quite right. So, I decided to seek elsewhere – namely, the internet. 

I’ve been hearing a lot of buzz around ‘soap brows’ for a while, especially on Instagram (the hashtag currently boasts over 45k posts). After a little digging, I learned that the trend is as obvious as it sounds: people are using freshly lathered soap to slick up their brows using a spoolie.

Although you could, technically, use any old bar of soap for the job, West Barn Co. (£19) has created a product that has been specifically created for brow use. So I went straight to the company’s site, and purchased a bar of my very own.

Here’s what happened when I put it to the test.

First thoughts:

Soap Brows by West Barn Co. comes in a 25g size and is held in a small, easy to open white tin. This is important, because if you were considering using a normal bar of soap, bear in mind you’ll have to find somewhere clean and waterproof to keep it. 

It comes with a good-sized bamboo spoolie which has some flexibility, so you can bend it inwards when scraping inside the tin. The soap also comes with a face mist (I plumped for the refreshing coconut dew flavour), which you use to squirt onto the soap and lather it up. The advantage to using a type of face spray as opposed to water is that it will help your brows stay stiff and tacky enough to keep in place.

Application:

Application is pretty simple. Some advice before you start, though? Give the soap two generous squirts of face mist to ensure that you get some properly lubricated lathering going on. Too dry and you’ll struggle to coat your brush easily and you could end up with white flakes in your brows, which is not a good look.

I use the spoolie to brush my hairs almost straight up, angling ever so slightly outwards. Once brushed, they’re noticeably wet for about seven minutes. Wait for them to dry, and then you can use the spoolie to do any last-minute angling. I gave it a go and found that my (now dry) brows were easy to move, yet still stiff enough to remain set in their new position – which is quite magical, really.

Verdict:

I received lots of comments on my brows almost immediately after plumping them up using this product. Where I had previously felt that above my brow was looking flat and sparse, Soap Brows seemed to thicken the hairs and drag them upwards enough to create the kind of feathery look that I like.

I honestly thought that after my run in at the salon, my brows were doomed for the next three weeks – at least – but I genuinely feel like using West Barn Co.’s Soap Brows brought them back to life. 

My top tips would be feel free to use any facial spray you have at home, or a less expensive alternative when you need to re-buy, as after experimenting with a few I don’t think you need the West Barn Co. one.

 Also, make sure you check on your brows about half an hour afterwards as sometimes little pieces of white residue can appear after the product has dried, so you’ll want to smooth that down. 

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