Anastasia Dipbrow Pomade Taupe

Sorry I've not been blogging much lately, but I've been kinda busy with some grown up shizzle involving moving house (eek) and, more scarily, moving in with a boy.

So unfortunately my hard earned pennies have been going on furniture and cleaning products and paint and carpets and the world's cutest elephant lamps...so I've had to shelve my cosmetics obsession for a bit to stop me ending up with a seriously empty piggy bank.

But we've been moved in now for a month and I've been paid (yay) so I thought it was only right to start giving my make-up habit a bit of TLC.

The first purchase I made was something I have been um'ing and err'ing about for SO long.  It's the Anastasia Dipbrow Pomade and I seriously was in two minds about whether to actually buy it.

My first issue was that I'm not much of a brow girl.  At all. 

I made my first foray into brows when I overplucked one eyebrow a year or so ago and my Mum lent me her brow pencil so I could do some serious repair work. 

Since then I've been a strictly pencil lady, following a somewhat disappointing experience with the Smashbox brow powder (review here).  Colour-wise, I swear by the Soap & Glory Archery pencil in Blonde Ambition and the L'Oreal Super Liner Brow Artist in Blonde.  The L'Oreal one especially is a bar-gain at £5.49 and is such a good colour for my skin tone and hair colour.  I always need a blonde which is cooler toned and a bit ashy, and that pencil is seriously my hero of the brow pencil world.  So I wasn't really in the market for a new brow product.

But there are some seeeeriously good reviews out there about the Anastasia Dipbrow Pomade, and I'm a sucker for a holy grail product.

So I bought it for £15.00 + £5 postage from net-a-porter (ouuuuchie to the price).   I was stuck on whether to get the "blonde" shade or the "taupe" shade and struggled to find many swatches or photos that reassured me on one or the other.  I did see a few mega orange-y looking photos of the "blonde" shade so in the end I plumped (nervously) for "taupe".

And oh. man. I love this.

The "taupe" colour is definitely an ashy toned colour but it's not too grey.  In fact it is a really good match for my natural eye brow colour, which I'd say is pretty mousey.  I think if you're blonde, it will only work if you already have quite dark eyebrows.  I've always had darker eyebrows than my hair colour, even when I had white blonde hair, so this blends in really well.  If you have very fair or 'true blonde' eyebrows then it may be too dark for you.  It's a very similar type of shade as L'Oreal's Brow Artist in Blonde so if you go and swatch that in a store then you can get a pretty good idea of the shade.  The only difference is that the L'Oreal once is a teeny bit warmer/yellowy based whereas the taupe has a more ashy base. I've compared the brow artist and the dipbrow pomade below...

L'Oreal on the left, Dipbrow on the right

So the shade was a massive relief, because I think one of the biggest giveaways with brows is if the shade just isn't right - too dark, too warm - it can be really tricky.  And that's one thing I am ALWAYS trying to avoid - obvious brows.  I don't really want to look like I do anything to my brows. I'm not looking for a 'made-up' look, I'm definitely going for more au naturel.

And this made me nervous about the dipbrow because a lot of the youtube tutorials I watched, or blog posts I found, were done by girls who go for a more defined, 'obvious' brow.  It looked good on them, but it's just not my cup of tea.  So I was worried the pigmentation of this was going to be wayyyy too much for me to handle, but I can reassure you that's not the case.

First things first, the pigmentation is strong.  The first time I applied this I wiped it straight off, as I looked like a clown.  But after I'd gotten a feel for it's strength and consistency, the more I used it, the better I got at it.  I use my Zoeva fine liner brush and literally tickle the top of the product to build up the brush, and use a very light touch.  That's all you need.  A small amount on the brush and a gentle hand doing small strokes of colour, and you'll notice you're building up a really natural but 'neat' brow.  And you are barely using any product.  This is going to last me for flipping ages.

The technique I've found to work best is to make little "hair like" brush strokes where the brows need filling in or where you need to change the shape generally.  So for example one of my brows doesn't have an even 'arch' across the top so where there's a 'dip' in the brow, I just put lots of tiny strokes of the product to bring the 'dip' in line with the rest of my arch.  If I go in with a continuous line then my brows look way too fake. 

I do still  feel the fear with this - I know that if I get too rushed or too heavy handed, then I'm going to look ridiculous.  I wouldn't apply it yet if I needed to be out the door in 5 minutes - I'd go for my trusty L'Oreal pencil, but I feel this pomade is similar to gel eyeliners.  They take a bit more care, a bit more practice and skill, but the pay off is a really neat, classy-looking finish which lasts for ages.

I'm not going to go into detail about the product itself, as most blog posts out there will talk you through the consistency (creamy) and the packaging (very high end) etc.  I just wanted to give my two-penneth worth on the two things that scared me the most - the pigmentation and the shade.  I think the proof is in the public and when wearing it, I didn't get any sarcastic comments from my boyfriend, close friends, work colleagues etc which reassured me that I didn't look like an absolute wally.

The main thing I've found is that this product is not just for the 'obvious brow' girls out there, it can also be used to achieve a very natural brow.  I've popped a photo below so you can see the finished effect, to (hopefully) show that it can look natural.  It has certainly earned a permanent little place in my makeup bag.