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Men’s Grooming – Do I Need To Trim My Eyebrows?

OK, since you asked… Yes, you should trim your eyebrows. Hear us out, though.

While you are certainly entitled to look how you want, but untamed eyebrows are something that people will remember about you, be it a first impression or lasting reputation. And, even though we aren’t your boss, we think your actual boss might like it if you kept those strays in check. Or, if you’re a self-employed millennial entrepreneur and really don’t have a boss, consider your eyebrows the last detail in your already intensive grooming regimen.

Hopefully this isn’t wildly shocking news.

Before we tell you how to get things under control, there’s an important distinction to make between “untamed” brows and “bushy” brows. Untamed brows might stray half an inch up the forehead, or threaten to form a unibrow. These you should trim. Bushy brows, on the other hand, are to be celebrated for their enormity and splendor… so long as they’re kept in check. We aren’t telling you to take them down a size, because they look damn good on you. But you, more than anyone else, might benefit from the occasional eyebrow trim.

Trimming vs. Plucking

Plucking eyebrows decreases their odds of regrowth, so says dermatologist Dr. Lindsey Bordone of Columbia University Medical Center in NYC). She advises plucking only the hairs you may never want back. (That is, only the strays inside the unibrow, or the ones that parade outside of your natural arch.)

However, sometimes the unkempt-ness comes some of the hairs that sprout from with the fuller brow; they can grow outside of the arch and start looking like tiny furry tumbleweeds. Don’t punish these ones by plucking them; they’re doing their job of filling in your brow. You’ll just need to trim them instead. (Think of it like detention, instead of expulsion.)

Why Trimming Is Quick and Infrequent

It’s rare that you’ll ever need to trim more than a few hairs at once. This is because eyebrow hairs have shorter growth phases than the hairs on your scalp or in your beard. Eyebrows are more like the rest of your body hair—sure, they can get wild and might need minor trimming, but they’ll stop growing after a certain length and soon fall out naturally. (Then they regrow.) This growth phase lasts four to six weeks, says Bordone. She notes that scalp hairs, in contrast, have a growth phase that can last years.

On average, eyebrows grow roughly one millimeter every six days. For a six-week phase, an eyebrow hair reaches nearly three quarters of a centimeter, before it’s done growing. It won’t fall out immediately, but when it does, it regrows much faster than other hairs. Exceptions do exist to this growth phase, which is why you notice the occasional outlier that needs a trim.

How to Trim Your Eyebrows

As for trimming those longer-than-usual hairs, take a mustache scissors and fine-tooth comb and comb the eyebrow straight up. Do this a few times to locate the offensive hairs, and then carefully snip them along the brow, so that the hair no longer falls out of its natural order. Comb the brow back into place, and you’re all set. Seriously, that’s it.

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Be sure to learn everything about this awesome program and even send out referrals.

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