Why I never retouch photos

The rule, stated plainly

I'm Jisun, the owner of London Brow in Seoul. My rule for photos is short. I do not change the shape, strokes, fine hairs, thickness, symmetry, colour or density of a brow. I do not smooth skin or reshape a face. I do not use AI to make a brow look more natural than it is. My records are unretouched eyebrow tattoo photos, and each label says when the photo was taken.

Cropping a photo to show the brow, or placing a small label beside it, is not editing the brow. Text on a card sits next to the work, never painted into it. If a photo cannot be shown without editing, I do not post it.

Why editing would mislead you

A brow is judged on small things: whether the front starts softly, whether strokes sit among the hairs, whether the two sides balance. These are exactly the details that a smoothing filter or a retouching app changes first. Edit them and the photo stops being a record.

There is also the skin and the face around the brow. If those were smoothed, the brow would look cleaner against them than it ever would on a real face in daylight. I would rather you see the brow against real skin, because that is how you will see your own in the mirror.

A zoom test you can run on any studio

You do not have to take my word for it. Zoom in on the skin right next to the brow in any record. Real skin shows pores, fine hairs and small changes in tone. If the area looks like plastic, or the hair edges blur into the skin, something has been processed. Apply the same check to any studio, including mine.

Then look at the edge of each stroke. In an unedited photo, strokes have slightly uneven edges, the way real lines do. If every stroke looks perfectly crisp and identical, ask how the photo was prepared. This check takes a few seconds and tells you more than a caption.

The same rule, from your side

The rule helps in your consultation too. When you send a photo of your brows, send it unfiltered: daylight, straight on, no beauty mode. A filtered selfie hides the very hairs I need to see, and the design I suggest would be for a brow you do not have.

If you want to go further, ask me which record shows a starting brow closest to yours, and look at it with the zoom test. You will see exactly what the camera saw on that day, with nothing added.

Common questions