Before and after: hair strokes next to the original hair

Two slides, one brow

I'm Jisun, the owner of London Brow in Seoul. Most hair stroke brows before and after photos are made to show a transformation. This record is more useful than that. It is from the first London Brow in 2020, a Natural Brow, which is my menu name for natural hair-stroke brows, the microblading-style hair strokes people search for. The first slide is labelled right after the session, the second is labelled before, and both are posted as taken, without editing. The caption adds one phrase: natural texture, meaning the strokes were kept natural.

I describe the brow in the slides, not the person. And I would ask you to read the slides in the opposite order from the one Instagram gives you: before first, after second. The before slide is where the design came from.

Read the before slide first

Open the before slide and zoom in. A before slide is not a photo of a problem; it is a photo of hair. Look for three things, in the order I usually look for them. Where does the hair start at the front, and which way do the first hairs point? Through the middle, which direction do most hairs take, and is there a place where they thin or turn? And at the tail, where does the hair actually stop, as opposed to where the brow seems to end from a distance? Those three answers are the map the strokes were drawn on.

While you are there, notice how much hair is present overall. The more hair a brow has, the more the strokes sit between hairs rather than standing in for them, and the more the after photo depends on direction being right. That is why I spend the first part of every consultation on the hair that is already there.

Then the after photo: strokes that follow

Now open the first slide and look for the same three places. At the front, the strokes should point the way the first hairs pointed in the before slide, upward, and begin softly rather than as an edge. Through the middle, each stroke should lie in the direction of the hairs around it, so that from a step back you cannot easily say which lines grew and which were drawn. Where the before slide showed hair thinning, the strokes fill the gap by following the neighbors on either side, not by taking a new direction. And at the tail, check where the strokes end against where the hair ended before. In a natural brow the shape stays within the footprint the hair already made, because the aim is to keep the original impression rather than to replace it.

The honest test is to switch between the two slides a few times and watch one spot, say the middle of the brow. If the strokes have followed the hair, the spot looks like the same brow with more texture. If a stroke runs against the hair beside it, the eye catches on it at once. How closely strokes can follow depends on how clear the hair's direction is, and that varies from person to person.

What before and after does not mean here

The after slide shows one day, the day it is labelled with. It does not show a later day, and I do not describe one. The pair is not a claim about how much a brow can change; it is a record of strokes drawn next to the hair that was already there. I publish records like this one as taken, unedited, with the moment written on them, so that the comparison you make is between two real photographs and nothing else.

Map your own hair direction before you message

You can make your own before slide. Take a straight-on photo of your bare brows in daylight, open it in your phone's markup tool, and draw three small arrows on one brow: one at the front in the direction the first hairs point, one through the middle, one at the tail. Then mark where the hair actually stops. That takes a minute, and it tells me more about what the strokes will do than any description of the brow you want.

Consultations at London Brow are translation-assisted over WhatsApp, so send the marked photo with one line: 'My arrows. The middle is where the hair thins.' In the room, ask me to show you on the sketch which strokes follow your arrows and which fill a gap between them. If every stroke has a neighbor it is following, the after photo will read like this one: the same brow, with more texture.

Common questions