To pluck or not to pluck

EYEBROW shaping is considered a mini-facelift by beauty professionals, as it offers the quickest and most natural way to brighten up the face by making women's eyes appear larger.

For some of us, this means a constant battle with tweezers, the mirror and watery eyes. For others, it means a trip to the salon for similar torture or waxing. What many of us don't realize are the advantages and disadvantages involved.

Many are afraid of waxing because they believe the pain inflicted is worse than that of tweezing. The idea of having warm wax applied to hair and then ripped off suddenly is just too much for some to bear.

To get to the bottom of the debate, I visited Rachel Doige at Chingford's Back to Beauty clinic in Station Road. She agreed to shape one of my eyebrows with wax and the other with tweezers so that I could compare the pain and results.

Rachel's clinic offers a nice, relaxing environment for any beauty treatment, and I found that I was completely at ease.

According to Rachel, using tweezers is akin to medieval torture and offers no advantages compared with waxing. With that, she started on the right eye, and sure enough, the tweezers painfully and painstakingly removed my rampant eyebrow hairs.

When I use tweezers at home, it doesn't seem as bad as when a beauty professional does it because I'm basically just cleaning up the eyebrows, not shaping them. To really shape the eye, many hairs have to be removed individually, and there's pain involved with every pluck.

As my right eye teared up, Rachel switched to the left and applied warm wax along the edge of my brow. She then applied a cloth to just a small part of the waxed area and ripped it off, along with my eyebrow hair. The pain was quick and sharp and nowhere near as painstaking. She pulled at my eye in short, swift movements, quickly pulling up the wax and the unshapely parts of my brow. One of the pulls nearly made me cry for help as Rachel pulled up most of the middle section of my brow, but the pain quickly subsided.

As Rachel explained, waxing is less painful because it's a bit like pulling off a plaster, and you get more hairs in one go. Waxing also leaves a cleaner shape and goes deeper into the follicle, meaning it doesn't have to be done as often as tweezing. Thank goodness.

Rachel recommends that women have their eyebrows shaped once every four weeks.

If you have sensitive skin and are worried about the effect of waxing, ask your beautician to try just a small area first. You should also make sure that the wax being used is 100 percent natural and won't expose you to any harsh chemicals or dyes.

Most beauty clinics charge between £4 and £10 for eyebrow shaping, whether it's by tweezing or waxing. Unless you're a masochist, I'd recommend you try the quick and thorough wax.

12:42 Thursday 3rd April 2003

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