If your brows aren’t quite up to your bold standards, you might have pursued eyebrow tinting as a way to up the ante on your brow game. After all, eyebrows have become a feature of many people’s makeup routines over the past few years!
They’re the star of your face, and not just because it’s trendy. Some studies show that thicker, bolder brows are actually considered more attractive than thinner brows. Plus, having the right brow shape and style for your face does wonders as far as framing your features and making everything on your face, from your makeup to your eye color, seem to pop a bit more.
Sometimes, though, leaving your appearance in the hands of a professional doesn’t go quite according to plan—and sometimes the look we thought we wanted doesn’t actually work once we see it outside of our imaginations. Many of us know the pain of ill-conceived bangs and the long wait that follows to get them to grow out. But what if you get your eyebrows tinted, and it comes out darker than you expected, or it just doesn’t work on your face as you’d hoped?
Because eyebrow tinting is meant to be semi-permanent and can last up to a month with proper care and carefulness, it might be terrifying to think you’ll have to go through weeks on end with a pair of strangely colored caterpillars on your face. So let’s have a chat about how to remove eyebrow tint if it just isn’t working for you.
How To Remove Eyebrow Tint
Under normal circumstances, your eyebrow tint can last anywhere from a week to a month depending on how you care for them. Your tint will last longer if you go out of your way to keep your brows from getting wet and steer clear of your brows when it comes to any extra exfoliating or cleansing you do with your face.
Naturally, though, when exposed to normal cleansers and the natural oils on your skin, if you don’t go above and beyond to protect your brows, they’re liable to fade within a week. Insert sigh of relief here. But there are ways to speed up the process if you got your brows tinted for some kind of party or event and are dreading the pictures with your new look.
Use Oil-Based Makeup Remover
While the effectiveness depends on the type of dye used to tint your brows, you can use an oil-based makeup remover on a simple cotton round to swipe over your brows. This should begin to remove some of the tint right away!
Shampoo Your Brows
It might feel a bit weird to go into the store to get shampoo specifically for your eyebrows, but you’re going to need a specific kind of shampoo to handle this crisis: clarifying shampoo. While pretty much all shampoos are 80% to 90% water, the makeup of that last bit of product is really important here!
Unlike your day-to-day shampoo, clarifying shampoos are designed to strip your hair of any buildup or additional product that might get trapped or attached to the strands—in this case, you’re using it to help strip your brow tint. You’ll want a clarifying shampoo formulated with ammonium-sodium lauryl sulfate, chlorides, bromides, or cetyl-fatty alcohols. These are the ingredients that will be most effective in helping you return your brows to normal.
DIY
Rather than having to get a new product, you can just pop into your kitchen and grab some baking soda. Mix a bit of baking soda with enough of your normal shampoo to create a paste, and apply that to your brows. You’ll want to let it sit on your brows for a bit before you rinse it off to get the most out of this simple DIY solution.
Cover It Up
If you’d rather not mess with the brow tint, even if you can’t stand it, you could go a different route. Instead of trying to remove the tint, you can just use makeup to cover it up. We recommend a mineral-based foundation or powder applied with a light touch to help reduce the way-to-strong impression your brows may be making.
You can also use brow gel! If you have a brow gel that matches your usual brow color, like our Ultra Defining Brow Gel, to help give your brows a more natural tone. If you’re more of a brow pen kinda gal, even a Tatbrow® Microblade Pen in a lighter color than your brow tint can help restore a more natural look to those bushy bothers.
How To Prevent Another Brow Blight
If you had a bad experience with brow tinting, you might be wondering if there’s any hope for getting the bigger, bolder brows you wanted in the first place and having them look good.
The first thing you should do if you’re going to try to get your brows tinted again is do some serious research when it comes to your technician. Brow tinting is generally safe and should be patch tested first to ensure that you won’t have a negative reaction to it, but it technically isn’t approved by the FDA, so it’s extra important to make sure you trust the person tinting your brows completely. In terms of getting the brows you want, it’s also crucial that you feel comfortable talking to them so you leave happy the next time!
The next thing you should do is to make sure that you’ve found the best shape for your brows. While it’s true the problem may actually be the color or tone of the dye used to tint your brows, it’s also possible that the issue is that tinting your brows just made your brow shape more apparent—and it isn’t the right one for your face.
Try reading up on the idea of eyebrow mapping so that you can make sure to get your brows into fighting shape before you get them tinted again. Brow mapping is a super easy and effective way to get an indication of what brow shape is most likely to flatter your face, so next time you get them tinted, you won’t need to know how to remove eyebrow tint at all.
In Conclusion
Brow tinting can be a really effective way to change the impression your brows make on the world! If you’ve always dreamt of thicker, bolder, or darker brows, brow tinting seems like a great option, because it can give the impression of fullness in a semi-permanent way without requiring the commitment and pain that comes with something like microblading.
But if you pursued brow tinting and didn’t like the results, it can totally send you into a panic spiral. Luckily, there’s no need to worry! While proper care can make your tint a semi-permanent feature on your face, there’s a flip side to that: with the proper products, you can quickly strip the tint from your brows and get back to normal. No stress, only a little bit of mess.
Shop the Look
If you’d rather cover your brows than strip the brow tint from them, here are some products you can use in a lighter shade than your tint to get them looking a bit more normal.
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