As every beauty enthusiast knows, eyebrows have the power to transform an entire makeup look. And for some, achieving that perfect arch requires a blank canvas. Enter: brow covering. Popular among the theater and drag communities, the time-honored technique involves masking your natural eyebrows (often using glue) in order to draw the shape of your choice, which is often more dramatic than your original brows.
“Brow shapes can be so expressive,” makeup artist Nick Barose, who has worked with Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Angelica Ross, tells Allure. “To me, brow and lip shapes always define the mood you’re trying to create on the face. More full brows can be natural, androgynous, and tough. More refined brows can create the dramatic, glamour effect, and then depending on the shapes you created, it can also make you look wicked and glamorous, which I love.”
You can also see brow covering on the red carpet. It was mastered by Barose himself for Lupita Nyong’o’s 2019 Met Gala glam. In the true spirit of camp, he glued down the Black Panther star’s eyebrows and drew a pair of long, slim ones in their place, finishing off the look by coating her brow bones with sweeps of pink and silver glitter. But this wasn’t the first time that Barose had flawlessly masked the actor’s brows. He also performed a more natural-looking brow cover on Nyong’o at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival.