How to make tweezing less painful

With Covid-19 on the rise again, we might soon have to resort to our old ways of plucking eyebrows. While tweezing is an easy and quick way to keep our bushy eyebrows in control, it isn’t any less painful than our usual threading or waxing.

Here are a few steps that can help prevent tweezer-induced tears.

Take a hot shower

Founder of Anastasia Beverly Hills, Anastasia Soare (a.k.a. the brow queen), recommends hopping in for a hot shower or using a warm compress on your eyebrows and the areas surrounding it while prepping to tweeze stubborn hair. “This will help open up the pores and ease discomfort,” she says. Make sure to use a cold compress instead of a warm compress post tweezing. It will help reduce any inflammation that was caused due to pulling hairs out of the skin. It will also help to soothe and calm the skin.

Magnifying mirrors can be dangerous

Magnifying mirrors can at times be more dangerous than useful. They can be the quickest way to getting carried away, and chances are, you don’t need to tweeze as much as you think. Brows should begin directly above the middle of your nostrils, end where the corner of the nostril connects with the outer corner of the eye, and the highest point of the arch should connect the middle of the tip of the nose with the middle of the iris. If you fill in your brows using these guidelines prior to tweezing, it will ensure you don’t get “tweezer-happy,” causing yourself more pain.

Pick the right tweezer

Since the brow bone is curved, use a quality pair of slant-tipped tweezers to avoid breaking off the hair too far from the skin’s base; this will cause unnecessary pain. Make sure to look for a tweezer that will pull out the thickest hair as well as the finest baby hairs.

Tweeze the right way

Once you have your tweezers, you’ll want to ensure you’re doing the deed correctly. “You always want to make sure you are getting as close to the base as possible and tweezing the hair in the direction of its growth,” Anastasia Soare says. I can stand by this rule from personal experience. Plucking my hair in the opposite direction makes the skin super irritated and makes tweezing far more painful than usual.