Got The Worst Eyebrows? Read Our Guide To Grooming Mens Eyebrows

First, most of them look at me quizzically wondering if I had asked them because their brows were out of control.

Then, they wonder if they should bother since guys don’t usually do that. They also don’t know how to pluck eyebrows and wonder if it is worth the effort.

I am here to tell you mens eyebrows are worth taking care of, too and you don’t need to wait until your barber asks you to do it. Mens eyebrows should look good, too. How to pluck eyebrows and keep them groomed is not a skill that only applies to women!

This guide will give you some tips on how to do mens eyebrows so they look natural.

You may not think that you need to do this, but people do notice a small thing like a few stray hairs poking out above your eyes.

Before I get into the mens eyebrows maintenance guide, here is a link to the tools you need to do your own eyebrows. To avoid having the worst eyebrows out there, it pays to take some time to learn how to trim and groom them.

Here is a step by step guide on how to do your eyebrows

Evaluation

Take a look in the mirror. Do you often think you have the worst eyebrows and need to get them under control?

What do you see?

Does it look like you have a couple of caterpillars crawling above your eyes?

Worse, yet, does it look like there’s one big one?

Even if the brows are not looking quite that bad, if you see some strays sticking out or they aren’t quite symmetrical then something should be done. You don’t have to have the world’s worst eyebrows to do something about them.

Be on the lookout for uneven areas, stray hairs poking out, gray hairs and overarching. Take a look at some magazines and see what the guys in there have for eyebrow shape and use that as a guide while you evaluate your own.

The Game Plan

There are multiple ways to tame mens eyebrows, but the best way to avoid the worst eyebrows depends on what you actually need to do.

If the main part of your eyebrows are fine, but you have some areas around them that make one look longer than the other then the approach is to shape them rather than trim them.

If you have stragglers that are longer than the rest, then they need to be trimmed.

The worst eyebrows have got to be the unibrow. If you have a unibrow then you may need to actually do both, trim and shape.

Men’s eyebrows should be more or less straight across. If you have some serious arches, then you may want to try to shape them lightly. You don’t want to shave too deeply into the eyebrow so this is kind of a tough call. I guess, if there is an arch and the hairs on the top part of the eyebrows are not very thick and are kind of sparse, then you can get rid of those to make them look a little straighter.

I’ll get into the different approaches for straight eyebrows in a minute, but it is important to understand what you need to do so you can choose the right tool for straight eyebrows.

Pluck

The easiest, most effective, but also the most painful, way to trim and shape mens eyebrows is to pluck them. Be careful, though. Overplucking can lead to the worst eyebrows that don’t look natural.

Using a mirror, take an eyebrow brush or a fine toothed comb to brush out your eyebrows, with an upward motion.

Go from the bottom of the brows to the top, to ensure you end up with straight eyebrows.

The strands that are sticking out beyond the tops of your eyebrows can then be grabbed by the tweezers and plucked right out.

This may be all you need at this point and it only took a couple of seconds.

Shaping to ensure straight eyebrows is a bit more of a chore and where it can get a little painful.

Now, if it really hurts more than just a little sharp pain then stop. If it hurts so much that it continues for more than a couple of seconds after then that is not a good sign. It shouldn’t hurt that much, so just stop plucking and move on to another method.

If you have some finer or shorter hairs around the edges of your eyebrows, I don’t recommend shaving them as in a few days you will have some stubble visible there.

Instead, use the tweezers to pluck out the ones that stray away from the body of your eyebrows.

Do this carefully and methodically. You don’t want to go into the “hairline” so to speak. In other words, don’t mess with the actual shape of the bulk of your eyebrows. yes, they should be straight eyebrows, but they shouldn’t look unnatural.

You’re really just trying to define the edges.

If you have a unibrow, then you can pluck out the hairs that grow in the bridge of your nose. Just do enough to separate the brows so they look like two distinct ones and not so much that you’ll be left with a big, red and irritated patch of skin on your forehead.

Trim

Mens eyebrows are not any different than women’s aside from the fact that they can be left more natural in their shape.

So, you can use the same tools as them to manage your brows.

Use either a trimmer, like the ones reviewed in our article about the best tools for trimming eyebrows, or use a pair of trimmer scissors.

Scissors won’t be able to edge your eyebrows or shape them, but you can even out the length of all of the hairs with them.

Evening out the length means making the overall length shorter. This will take a lot of the density out of the eyebrows and make them look less bushy as well as making them more uniform.

Just use a fine toothed comb and, like before, come from the bottom to the top. Then coming down from the top, with the teeth facing down. Comb into the eyebrows and stop there. You will see the long ones protruding out and then just snip with the scissors.

Don’t try to freehand this without the comb. The comb is like a barrier to protect the rest of your hairs from getting cut. If you try to freehand while looking in the mirror you may end up cutting way to short. Or, worse yet, give yourself a bald spot.

If you have a set of small beard trimmers, then you can do the same procedure with the comb and run the trimmer blade over the comb and cut down the longer hairs this way.

Of course, the best way is to use a dedicated trimmer that has a guard on it to just buzz it right over your brows in just a couple of seconds work.

If you have a nose hair trimmer, take a look at the instructions as it may also double as an eyebrow trimmer and you can use that. I wouldn’t bother going out and buying a trimmer just for your eyebrows, though.

Shave

You may have been to a barbershop that used the straight edge razor to shape your eyebrows. I would recommend that you ask your barber to not do this or be tempted to do it yourself.

As I mentioned before, if you shave the outside edge of your eyebrows, you will end up with stubble in no time and that looks worse than your eyebrows not being shaped properly.

Then you are forced to shave around them every couple of days. Forever.

Do yourself a favor and refrain from shaving them.

If you or your barber have actually shaved your eyebrows and messed up the shape, or you have stubble after a few days, then you need to start over. You will have to let them grow back in. It will be a little awkward for a week or two while you have tat stubble around your eyebrows, but it is worth it.

Once they come back in, then start at the beginning. Do an evaluation that is exactly the opposite of what you had done that led to you shaving them.

Wax

There are wax kits available to shape mens eyebrows at home, but I don’t recommend doing that here.

Unless you already have experience with waxing, then the risk of messing up and ruining your eyebrows is too high. Then, there is also the risk of getting hot wax in your eyes and doing even worse damage.

If you have a wife, girlfriend or friend that knows what they are doing then, go ahead with a home wax kit for mens eyebrows, otherwise, get to a salon where they do this kind of thing and leave it to the professionals.

Threading

I once went to a Turkish barber in Dublin, Ireland and he did a pretty cool procedure called threading for male eyebrows.

What that entails is a thread that is wound up around the edges of your eyebrows. Then pulled away from your skin taking the hair with it.

It’s a pretty ingenious system that cost no extra money to have done in that shop, but now aestheticians charge pretty good money for mens eyebrows threading.

If you don’t have a Turkish barber nearby then I recommend a trip to your local salon to have them thread your eyebrows. Like plucking, it takes a while for the hair to grow back so you don’t have to think about your eyebrows again for some time.

If you do have a Turkish barber nearby, then I recommend you go there as the whole experience is incredible beyond them threading your eyebrows.

Fixing Eyebrows: Keep These Grooming Rules in Mind

Don’t overdo it

The idea here is just to trim them or shape them enough to look natural.

If you get a little too enthusiastic, then you can end up with too thin or too short brows that just look overdone.

You want to look like your groom yourself and not that you are trying out for RuPaul’s Drag show.

If people notice something different about your appearance but they can’t quite put their finger on what it is that’s different, then you did your eyebrows right. If they notice right away because there is a dramatic difference, then you may have overdone things.

Don’t arch them

When trying to decide on a shape, you should just make sure they are as straight across as possible. Don’t make them into an arch.  Mens eyebrows should be straight eyebrows and not arched.

Natural brows follow the contour of your eyes. Stick with straight eyebrows and you will be fine.

On the other hand, if your brows naturally have an arch, then leave that shape. If you have to shave off the bulk of your brows to make them more straight, then that won’t look right either. And again, you will end up with the dreaded stubble afterward and male eyebrows especially show this stubble worse than women.

Natural color

Male eyebrows should match hair color wise.

If you have gray hair, then let the gray hairs grow on your brows. You should trim or pluck according to the length of the stray hairs and not the color. How to pluck eyebrows is something that may take a little practice to look natural.

If your gray hairs are short and then you pluck them, you may end up with some thin spots.

Just let the color go the way it goes naturally.

Not only will your look odd with thin spots on your brows, but thick black eyebrows with gray hair won’t look right either. This goes back to the advice to not overdo it. If you’re concerned about your eyebrows being gray then you are overthinking things. If you manage your eyebrows well, then it doesn’t matter if some are gray or not. People will think they look nice regardless.

How to regrow your eyebrows if you mess them up

Let’s say you went a little wild when you decided to trim your eyebrows. Maybe their too thin or you made them uneven.

Is all hope lost? Or is there some way that you can fix them?

Short of shaving them off and starting over, which I don’t recommend, you’ll need to regrow them and do some tweaking as they come in to get them back to normal.

Here are a few tricks to help your eyebrows look normal again if you are in a rush.

Brush them

Much like a guy that does the comb over to hide the bald spot on his head, you can brush the hairs to make your eyebrows seem wider than they actually are.

Hopefully the “body” of the eyebrows are long enough that they can be brushed and the longer of them can go up over the limit of where you shaved or shaped them.

And, hopefully you didn’t pluck them as they will take longer to grow in.

Exfoliate

This may seem a little funny, but you will need to do some exfoliation of the area around where you shaped your eyebrow.

One way to get hair to grow faster is to bring some new skin up to be exposed to you can add some products like essential oils to help boost some growth. More on that in a minute as it is a tip in and of itself.

To really allow any product you might use to go deep into the skin layers and stimulate some growth you need to expose the skin underneath the older top layer.

The best way to do this is to use a toothbrush to go around the spot where you shaved. Just wet the brush and lightly rub it on your skin around your eyebrows for a couple of minutes.

Add products

By products I mean something to stimulate the skin here. What will happen is you will increase the blood circulation to the surface of your skin. When this happens the increase in blood flow brings with it more oxygen and loads of nutrients that the hair roots need to grow faster and thicker.

Using hair growth products here is never a bad idea as you will see much faster results.

I highly recommend some essential oils. In fact if you have any beard oil for growth then you would absolutely use that here as it does the same thing.

Look for peppermint oil as it has been shown to be as effective as Minoxidil at promoting new hair growth. Any type of menthol essential oil works too, like tea tree or eucalyptus.

Castor oil is also great at stimulating the skin and promoting faster growth. Again, if you already have a beard oil that contains these ingredients then you can just use that. Otherwise head over to Amazon and you can get the pure essential oils that you find in many hair serums and beard oils.

Must have supplies to trim your eyebrows

Having the right tool for the job is essential in just about any situation. When you are dealing with eyebrows, something everybody will be seeing and judging you over if you mess up, it is even more important.

Your best bet is to get tools specific for the job, but in a couple of cases can be used for other grooming, too.

Electric eyebrow/ear/nose trimmer

These are really important to have as they can be used for other grooming matters, yet are specific enough to eyebrows to do the best job you can expect.

Eyebrow trimmers are easy to use, painless and accurate.

They don’t get as close as eyebrow razors, but for most guys they get more than close enough. In fact one reason I recommend them also is because if you mess up the shape they will grow back faster since you didn’t shave it as close as with a razor.

Tweezers

You’ll probably read around and see that it isn’t recommended to pluck your eyebrows. And while I will agree that you shouldn’t be pulling out the long hair in the middle of your eyebrows, you should be plucking the finer and sparser hair along the edges as I alluded to earlier.

For this you need tweezers that are right for the job.

To speed up the process you’ll need the tweezers that have a slant tip so you can get maximum leverage against the skin.

This will allow you to not only get good purchase to be able to pluck the hair but also get a lot of fine hair at once.

Eyebrow scissors

To cut down the longer hair more discrimanently than with an electric trimmer, you should use scissors. This way you have more control over the length of the entire eyebrows and only take out the longer ones. This is especially helpful if you are trying to regrow your eyebrows if you made a mistake when shaping them so you aren’t having to deal with too short brows with some wild ones sticking up here and there.

The kind that have a spring are best since you want the blades very short and stubby. These scissors are too small to have inserts for your fingers and need to open and close themselves.

Magnifying mirror

Last but certainly not least, you need to be able to see yourself up close and personal while you trim your eyebrows. Especially if you are prone to mistakes. This is where a magnifying mirror is essential so you can be precise.

They don’t need to be that big, one you can put on your desk is probably going to be good enough though you can find some with telescopic arms that attach to your medicine chest in the bathroom.

If you find ones that have lights then that is even better as you may not have the best lighting in your bathroom.

Final Thoughts

I will admit that as a barber we get a bad rap when it comes to doing mens eyebrows. We are guys too and sometimes don’t really know the best way to do some things.

If you are confused about what to do with your eyebrows, then take a trip to a salon and ask a stylist there.

Women think about eyebrows way more than men in general. In fact, they probably will notice your eyebrows need work and already have a plan for what to do before you even get a chance to ask! They look at mens eyebrows probably as much as women’s

Once you find a pro that specializes in male eyebrows, go there first and you are happy with the results then you can just continue the same routine yourself at home if you don’t want to end up at the salon every few weeks to have your brows groomed.

This really should the easiest part of your grooming routine. It should only take a few seconds of your time once a week at the most. But, for some reason it has guys stumped.

If this guide didn’t answer any of your questions, reach out and we will help you out. Leave a comment in the box below!