A Face-Framing Tweak

Hi friend,

This week, our feature story tackles the topic of eyebrows and aging – specifically, it’s advice from an expert on different things we can try if we feel like our eyebrows are vanishing, or aren’t framing our face as well as they used to, or if we just want to perk things up a bit.

Hair loss overall has become a big market; as Business of Fashion reports, “Fifty percent of women will experience hair loss at some point in their life, due to stress, hormonal imbalances, aging, nutrition, genetics or a combination of all of these mitigating factors.” (For more on hormonal hair loss, check out this article we published on the topic.)

The Business of Fashion article alerted us to some of the brands focusing on this issue, like the product line Vegamour; Great Many, a new sort of medspa focused entirely on hair growth and scalp health; and Hårklinikken, which provides expensive, customized hair-restoration and scalp health regimens, and counts people like Gwyneth Paltrow as clients.

The hair-restoration products don’t stop at your scalp; as we learned, there are specific formulas for eyebrows, too. Read on for that, plus our recommendations for the weekend.

Bye,
Your friends at Gloria

“As a fresh 50-year-old, I'm pretty well versed in the demographic. I have a lot of older clients, and I hear it all,” says brow expert Michele Holmes of Michele Holmes Studio.

Holmes, who in a prior life had a career in the action sports industry, took her hobby of doing eyebrows professional in 2009. After the founder of cult-skincare brand Vintner's Daughter became a client, word of her talents spread. A subsequent write-up in the San Francisco Chronicle (she was dubbed the “eyebrow whisperer”) drove so much business her way that she opened her own studio. Now Holmes has two locations and seven employees. “When they say that kind of stuff happens, you don't believe it, but it actually happens,” she says of her success. “I've been with people through marriages, divorces, all the life events. When you touch people's faces, you connect with them. And it's just the most fun. Honestly, I can't imagine doing anything else.”

I called Holmes up to ask her all about eyebrow tending, and we spoke about over-plucked ones and the thick and bushy. For an eyebrow novice like me, the conversation was a little shocking. There's so much I didn't know. It dropped me into an entirely new world full of brush-on hair growth serums and tiny straightening treatments.

An edited and condensed version of our conversation – about what sort of gels or other products we should know about, and what happens specifically to our eyebrows as we age – is below.

What do women in their 40s and up come in wanting help with?

Hair loss and pigment loss. As we age, most clients start to lose the density in the tails of their eyebrows – the back half, from the arch down to the outer corner of their eye. It can feel drastic because it's not framing the entire eye. You’ve got the front of your eyebrow, which is really dense and nice, and then your tail sort of drifts off, so the balance isn't there. And we don't have as much tail hair to begin with. We tint the eyebrows to try to make that hair stand out again, or recommend a hair-growth product to try to grow it back.

With color loss, people start going gray overall or they'll develop a few thick white hairs. When those start to come in and they increase in number, it looks like you're missing your eyebrows, but it’s just pigment loss. When you tint those hairs, it makes your eyebrows look like they came back.

How long does that last?

A traditional brow tint is very gentle, because our brow hair is fragile, and it's going to last maybe four to five weeks. (White and gray hair are also very resistant to tint.) We’ll find a product that you can brush on in between appointments. 

Can you tell me about hair-growth products?

There are prescription-based ones, but we don't recommend those for brows because you'll get a lot of length instead of true follicle regeneration and growth.

If you tug on a hair for your entire life, eventually your follicle says, hey, the cells are getting weak and we don't want to produce another hair. In a healthy follicle, you're going to get a hair that's through the skin, and then a hair that's just sitting below the surface. And when the hair below the surface pushes out the dead keratin, the new one's there. You've got a constant cycle of growth. But when you wax, thread, or tweeze forever and ever, eventually some of those give out. 

Hormone-based growth serums stimulate the follicle to grow hairs again. You could do something like GrandeBrow, which is pretty cost-effective. It is good, it works. It has enough of the active ingredient, which is called prostaglandin. Prostaglandin is the hormone that produces hair and helps pump the hair out. Then there's RevitaBrow, which has a pretty high dose of prostaglandins, and Obagi, which is newer to the market, but we're seeing a lot of success with in every age group.

Every weekend brings the same challenge: How to put an outfit together that’s cute, but also comfy and casual. Ann Taylor’s Fall Weekend edit is the perfect anecdote.

Just take a look at this adorable striped henley sweater, or this cozy poncho (just the thing for chilly, early morning kids’ sports events). We also cannot get enough of this stunning V-neck navy sweater, and this very cool dark-rinse denim shirt. #partner

TO GO SEE In Lee (out today), Kate Winslet plays Elizabeth “Lee” Miller, the relentlessly brave photojournalist who defied gender norms to capture indelible images of World War II. Also in theaters: The big-screen adaptation of the book series The Wild Robot. If you’ve read them with your kids, you know they pull off an impossible combo: thrilling, gentle, and heart-warming.

TO EAT We just tried this crunchy pickle-salsa dip stuff at a friend’s house last weekend, and it’s definitely as tasty as everyone says it is. It sounds weird, but trust us. We ate it with tortilla chips, but we bet it’d be good on a sandwich, too.

TO LISTEN Occasionally, The New Yorker drops you into the life of some fascinating person you’ve never heard of before. Like their recently published story of an Italian priest who risks his life to help women escape the mafia. It’s by staff writer D. T. Max (who previously wrote about Beatriz Flamini, the woman who lived in a cave for 500 days), and you can listen to him read it here.

TO LEARN We are enjoying former J.Crew creative director Jenna Lyons’s very sporadic, very short, and very informative TikTok videos about fabrics. She’s recently discussed cashmere and wool, and also shared how she prefers to hand-wash her sweaters.

TO STREAM Wolfs, co-starring George Clooney and Brad Pitt as rival “lone wolf” crime-scene fixers forced to work together, is getting mixed reviews. But as a stream-at-home option? We’re in. Also on our “will watch” list: The new Netflix film Rez Ball, an uplifting sports drama about a Native American basketball team coming together after a tragedy.

Raves are back (good for young people!). • Just really liked this story about starting over. • Working up the courage to watch this docuseries on teens and social media. • We love that women are celebrating their 50th birthdays with cincuentañera parties. • Why do men do the things they do? We’ll never truly know.

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