This article was written Ashley Wilkins and repurposed with permission from Refinery29.
I remember when it all started: I was 10 years old, sitting on my great-grandmother’s lap, eating strawberries covered in sugar. She looked at me with delight and said, "We have the exact same eyebrows!"
Hers were big, white, wiry, and out-of-control. I was mortified at the comparison. The next day, I asked my mom if she could take me to the salon to get them waxed. "Not a chance," she said. So I had to take matters into my own hands: I found our family's only pair of tweezers (in a first-aid kit) and went to town. My eyebrows never grew back.
Fast forward to when I was in college and working for the Lancôme beauty counter in Sarasota, Florida. We brought in professional makeup artists for many of our quarterly training sessions. At one event, a makeup artist singled out my brows as an example of what not to do when creating a custom look—she referred to them as "Ronald McDonald" arches.
Her words stuck with me, but when I tried to grow my brows out, I had very little success. Instead, I became an expert at penciling them in. Once I graduated, though, I wanted a more permanent solution. By then, I felt completely naked without my penciled brows, which made life very difficult. I tried brow-growth serums, Rogaine, hair pills—anything I could think of. Nothing worked. I finally decided that getting a brow transplant was the solution for me.
For my brow transplant surgery, I went to Marc Dauer, M.D., in Los Angeles, who is a true artist. I was going to get around 650 grafts of hair, and it would cost $5,000.
There are two types of eyebrow transplants: Follicular Unit Transplant (FUT) and NeoGrafting. FUT is where they remove a four-inch-wide slice of scalp from the back of your head and then dissect all the hairs to graft in wherever you'd like. This method sounds terrifying and leaves a scar (granted, it's one that is only noticeable if you have a shaved head). NeoGrafting, on the other hand, involves using a machine to suck out the hairs from your scalp without leaving a scar. This sounded much better to me, but it has a lower success rate. So after Dauer calmed my fears of "being scalped," I decided to use the traditional FUT method.
I created a stencil for my ideal eyebrows, just like the kind you can buy at Sephora. When I arrived in L.A. at Dauer's office, we discussed exactly what was going to happen during the procedure. Then he let me draw on my own stencil, which he would use to complete the surgery. (You do have the option to let the doctor do this, but I am way too much of a control freak!)
Click HERE to read what really happens during eyebrow transplants from Refinery29!
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4 Tips For Getting Gorgeous Eyebrows
Well, That's One Way To Get Bold Brows
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