Eyebrow PM in hair technique: practical advice from Anna Zabolotnaya

Anna Zabolotnaya , Head of the Biotek International Academy of PM and Aesthetic Dermo-Pigmentation (Russia), certified artist, international class master teacher in permanent make-up, aesthetic dermopigmentation and trichopigmentation, winner of the first Contour of the Century competition (2003), judge of permanent make-up championships in Russia and abroad, lecturer at the International University of PM (Milan, Italy) (Russia)

The popular hair technique is one of the most difficult in PM. To work with it, you must be highly qualified, know different methods and techniques of correction and arm yourself with knowledge of color. Follow a few practical tips and you will master the technical skills needed to master the realistic Spikelet technique.

Eyebrows are one of the most important elements of our face. It is they who give our facial expressions a special expressiveness. The movement of the eyebrows is the very universal language that allows others to read our emotions: for example, raised eyebrows read as surprise, shifted ones mean dissatisfaction, and if the heads of the eyebrows are lowered down, then we experience strong irritation and even anger. The language of the eyebrows is by no means limited to this: the ability to move them to an arbitrary distance, and even independently of each other, allows you to express almost all possible emotions and their shades with eyebrows.

In addition, our judgments about the attractiveness or unattractiveness of a face largely depend on the density, shape, degree of symmetry of the eyebrows, their “fitting” into the general “landscape”.

Correction methods and techniques

Not every woman can boast of perfect eyebrows. And although there is no standard ideal, we can hardly call a beautiful face with ugly eyebrows.

At the dawn of permanent makeup, eyebrow correction was carried out by shading - that is, the eyebrows were simply painted over with a pigment of one color or another. This made it possible to even out the shape, give them the necessary symmetry, but with this technique, even shading the contour could not hide the fact that the eyebrows were simply drawn.

A little later, a new, so-called hair technique appeared, which consists in the fact that the master draws each hair separately. This technique is immeasurably more difficult than any painting or spraying, but after the procedure, the eyebrows look absolutely natural.

The complexity of the hair method, its painstakingness makes the masters resort to standard methods of execution. In the European technique, the hairs are schematically drawn, sometimes with the same (!) Strokes from bottom to top; in the same direction as real hairs. In the oriental technique, some of the hairs are drawn from top to bottom, i.e. in the "wrong" direction to create the most natural visual effect.

Someone believes that the use of standard schemes simplifies the procedure for eyebrow PM. But, firstly, the "schematic" method does not take into account the individuality of the client. The old joke comes to mind when a man comes to the patent office and says that he invented the shaving machine. They do not believe him: “But how? All faces are different! “This is just the beginning,” the man explains.

And secondly, the very simplicity of working according to one standard is not so obvious if you look closer. Working according to the drawn scheme, the master is doomed to follow all the smallest details without the right to make a mistake: one “wrong” line can destroy the entire original plan, destroy the conceived drawing.

Do not forget that a true master is always and above all an artist, a creator, and creativity does not tolerate schemes. It is done by inspiration, the inexhaustible source of which is the world around us, always ready to share original ideas with us. You just need to learn how to see them! By the way, nature also does not tolerate schemes: it is always asymmetric, unpredictable, and sometimes even chaotic. And at the same time majestic and beautiful. And its self-proclaimed "king" - a man - can only regret his impotence to create something equally magnificent.

Alignment with nature

But it's time to get back to our eyebrows. An excellent example of how nature gives us ideas is a spike of wheat or rye. This part of the plant has nothing to do with our face, but its structure is surprisingly similar to the structure of an eyebrow: all links go in order, each new one overlaps the previous one. The awn of the spikelet closes the beginning of the spikelet. Just like the next tail of a hair closes the beginning of the previous one. In general, natural selection did a good job on cereals, spikelets of which can be found in all sorts of ornaments, and in graphics, and even in heraldry. And not only because cereals are our oldest food. First of all, because of the engineering simplicity and beauty with which they are designed by nature. However, try to find symmetry in spikelets, or at least one perfectly straight line. That's right: they are not there. As there are none in the human body as a whole and in each of its elements separately. Perfectly symmetrical eyebrows also do not exist. And if we talk about the hairs that make up our eyebrows, then finding two identical ones among them is an impossible mission for the most meticulous researcher.

The hairs differ in size, shape and even color. All of them grow along their own trajectories, which are not only not parallel, but, on the contrary, directed in all directions.

Eyebrows in hair technique. Photos provided by the author

Realistic "Spikelet"

My eyebrow correction technique is called “Spikelet”, because the ears of cereals and our eyebrows are designed in the same way. However, its essence is not to draw spikelets in place of the eyebrows. And in order to, abandoning schemes that are far from reality, to depict eyebrows with maximum realism. That is, avoid exact repetitions of the direction of growth, length, thickness and color of the hairs. The Spikelet technique is quite painstaking, but I would not say that it is distinguished by some incredible complexity.

It is much more difficult for a drawing person to draw a dozen identical parallel segments than a hundred similar, but still different lines.

The drawing starts with a line. But, as in the fine arts, so in permanent makeup, it is not the line itself that is important, but the form formed by the combination of lines. The hair line can be thick at first, become thin and dissolve in the body of the eyebrow, turn into strokes at its fracture, so that, after crossing it, it becomes a line again.

The line is the border of the areas of colors, shadows and shapes. And here it is very important to understand that, speaking of the variety of lines in the Spikelet technique, we do not mean chaos at all. Not chaos, but naturalness, not copying, but the creation of similarities. Both the first and the second require careful study, the result of which should be an understanding of the laws of naturalness and the principles of similarity. The difference between the law of natural hair growth and the scheme is that the former, being universal, provides a variety of human eyebrows, the hairs of which they are composed, their shapes, colors, etc. While the scheme allows only copies that are far from the original.

Correction rules

Having studied the laws and principles that describe our eyebrows, the master, who achieves the maximum naturalness of the result of the correction procedure, must follow these rules. He seems to rise up and sees not individual hairs, but the picture as a whole. A picture consisting of certain angles of inclination of lines, points of their intersection, the ratio of their sizes and distances between them. The artist must be truthful, so he must recreate these elements with particular diligence. Failure to follow the pattern in drawing the elements of the picture creates a risk of getting a beautiful, but far from natural result.

When we draw eyebrows, we are limited to two dimensions - length and width. To give a drawing a third dimension, to show depth, it is necessary to understand why we perceive it as depth. Find such an arrangement and such a distribution of color shades that create exactly the contrast that is necessary to give visual volume to the eyebrows. Speaking of specific techniques, it is worth mentioning the contrast that occurs between long and short hairs or the color contrast that is even more understandable to us.

We say “color contrast”, but in fact the master must understand that when performing eyebrow correction, he will deal with shades rather than with colors, the number of which should not exceed three, otherwise he will have to paint with mud. Each complex color consists of several shades of other colors. Each pigment is designed to be cool or warm, dark or light.

Continuation of material here

The material was first published in Permanent No. 1/2018