Five Years, Six Jars
I’ve been buying the same eyebrow product since 2021. I still don’t know if it’s the best.
My first jar arrived February 3, 2021. I’m currently on my sixth.
I stopped counting somewhere around the point where I realized I’d been buying the same eyebrow product for about five and a half years without ever once considering an alternative.
That’s certainly not normal for me. I research everything. Most recently I opened seventeen tabs to buy placemats so the fact that this thing has quietly survived every makeup bag purge, every trend cycle, every “well, what if this new product is better” is the whole reason I’m writing about it.
I spent about three minutes researching this product and unknowingly over a year researching the person who recommended it.
Some links below are affiliate links; I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. I link to things I’ve bought, things I’ve rejected, and things I’m still deciding on. I’ll always say which.
My brows
They are thick, long, and definitely sisters, not twins or whatever the saying is. I’m grateful for the thickness. I have witnessed the alternative and know what people pay to fake it. But mine curl and grow like weeds in multiple directions. I can comb them one way and in the blink of my eye they’ve curled downwards in an attempt to tickle my eyelashes.
For years I got them waxed. Over $75 a visit by the end, and I was on the hamster wheel where you go, it looks great for ten days, and then you have to go again.
I used to work in beauty and fashion. I wasn’t an editor which meant I wasn’t on the press list, but I was close enough that I had visibility into the beauty closet and sometimes was the beneficiary of free products. Better than that, there was the information. And the piece of information that changed things was someone telling me to stop waxing entirely. Tweeze only. My brow guy told me tweezing would preserve the natural shape and warned that repeated waxing could eventually thin the hair. So tweezing at around $200 a session, it was. It was either that or going bald in the eyebrows.
And then I stopped. No waxing. No tweezing. I decided I’d lived with my own face long enough to figure something out, and I wasn’t going to keep paying that much to have someone else decide what my brows should look like.
And that’s where I still am today. I was able to figure out a general routine, taking what I learned from my brow guy and apprehensively applying it. “If you’re unsure if you should pluck a hair, sleep on it” he would tell me. I went slow and was conservative, but there were times I accidentally trimmed too much or plucked chunks out of my brows. Thankfully their thickness and length allow me to employ a combover technique of sorts. And that’s where Anastasia Beverly Brow Freeze comes into the picture.
But first there was the soap thing. Do you remember people smearing bar soap on a spoolie and combing it through their brows to hold them in place? I watched that from the sidelines with skepticism and never tried it.
But then I noticed when actual brands started releasing their answer to it. A TikTok trend is one thing, a trend that companies with formulation budgets start responding to is another. I was listening.
The one that got me was a former colleague posting about the Anastasia Beverly Hills Brow Freeze Flexible-Hold Clear Lifting & Sculpting Wax. Sponsored, or something like that, I would normally keep scrolling.
Except in this case I’d worked with her for nearly two years. I’d been to Japan with her on a work trip. I’d seen her brows in person, in humidity, not just through a ring light. And she went to the same person who used to tweeze mine.
I didn’t need to research the product. I’d already done the longer version of that work on her without even knowing it so I bought it.
I’m technically using it wrong
The official method is to dip the brush in the product, swipe it on top of the lid and work the product through from there. That’s what she demonstrated and that’s what I did. It worked immediately. My brows stayed put. In Miami nonetheless. Which, if you’re familiar, you know that this is a city that undoes blowouts on the walk from the car to the door.
Eventually I stopped bothering with the lid and started going straight into the jar and straight onto my brow. I find the jar lasts me longer that way and mine are thick enough to take it. I’ve found the more product I work in, the better they hold. Your mileage will differ if yours are finer.
My current jar is on day 314 and isn’t quite finished. Its replacement is already waiting in the wings.
It’s important to note that Brow Freeze wasn’t the entire fix. I also had to learn to trim them, and figure out which direction actually suits my face rather than which direction they happened to grow. That part changed my face more than the product did and influenced how I do my makeup, how I photograph, how I look at myself, etc. The Brow Freeze just allowed those efforts to stay put.
If I let them get too long, they’ll curl back down regardless of how much product I use. Trimmed, they hold. Untrimmed, no sculpting wax on earth is going to freeze them.
The brow lamination detour
I got engaged and did what a lot of people do, which is obsess over my face, experiment with different beauty treatments and decide that the version of my face I liked the most needed to be preserved for the big day.
Lamination was supposed to do what Brow Freeze does for me every day, but last for an extended period of time. How lucky would my husband-to-be be if he got to wake up next to my perfectly styled eyebrows every morning I thought. I learned the hard way that lamination was most definitely not the way to go for me. The chemicals burned my skin, and when it settled, the result was worse than what I get from a jar of Brow Freeze in thirty seconds every morning.
I paid over $250 to make something semi-permanent that I already had. That’s an expensive mistake that is hard to warn people about because the alternative isn’t necessarily a service someone can sell you an appointment for.
I wore the Brow Freeze on my wedding day.
Gotta be honest
I have not meaningfully tested the eyebrow product field.
I tried Refy Brow Sculpt Shaping and Lifting Gel with Strong Hold once, on a girls trip. I borrowed it from a friend and it was less than fine, but that’s not really data. I used it twice, in the car after visiting a national park and then on the way to a rodeo. It wasn’t mine and the rest of my makeup wasn’t done so it’s not really a comparison. At best, I guess you could call that an anecdote.
So I can tell you with confidence that Brow Freeze works. I cannot tell you it’s the best one, because I haven’t lived with anything else long enough to know, and I’m suspicious of anyone who claims otherwise about a product you have to use for months before you know how it truly fits into your life.
So is six jars a verdict, or complacency?
Complacency renews whether or not you’re paying attention; it’s basically a subscription. This is definitely not that. Every time I’ve almost run out, I’ve noticed, and bought it again over everything new I’d been shown in the meantime. All that to say, I keep choosing it.
Receipts
Verdict: Proven for me, not proven against what else is out there.
What I paid: Five or six jars over the course of about five years. Against $75+ a visit for waxing, ~$200 a visit for tweezing, and one lamination burn I’ll never get over.
What would change my mind: If Anastasia Beverly Hills changed the formula or if I read an article like this about a similar product I hadn’t considered.
Revisit: February 2027