00:00Not knowing is scary.
00:02People get nervous about it being chemicals,
00:05but it is just a relaxer for the eyebrow hair.
00:13I'm Mikaela Williams, and I'm getting brow lamination
00:15done today.
00:16When I was in elementary school, people
00:18used to always make fun of me for my eyebrows.
00:20They used to be super thick and kids tease.
00:24So that was one of the things I got teased for,
00:26just being super hairy and just all types of things.
00:29Right?
00:30As you can see from my baby pictures,
00:32I have like a unibrow.
00:35When people were making fun of me,
00:36they were making fun of the unibrow.
00:41First time I heard about brow lamination,
00:42I thought of my second grade teacher
00:45laminating a piece of paper, and I was very confused.
00:50And then I looked it up, thank goodness for Google,
00:53and I learned that it's a substance
00:55that they put on your eyebrows to relax them,
00:57to really give them a shape that you're able to work with.
01:01It's exciting to see a procedure that's inclusive
01:03of my hair type, and then I can start the conversations
01:06about eyebrow hairs in the Black community.
01:08Me being the expert, I just want you to have
01:12the most beautiful brows.
01:14My name is Callie Smith, and I'm the owner of Fiction
01:17Cosmetic Tattooing in Echo Park, Los Angeles.
01:20Brow lamination is breaking down the bond of the hair
01:25and making it pliable so you can move it into
01:28what direction works best for your aesthetic.
01:31It only lasts about eight to 12 weeks.
01:34When I first heard about brow lamination,
01:37I was like, what is brow lamination?
01:40It's kind of got a crazy name.
01:41I've heard it be called many things, brow lift, brow gelling,
01:46brow flip, I am not going to do anything that causes harm
01:52to your eyebrows, or to your eyebrow hair,
01:55or to your surrounding skin.
02:00People would be surprised.
02:01Just because you have thick eyebrows doesn't mean
02:03that they are necessarily any easier to take care of,
02:06that your maintenance is just, you know,
02:07oh, I'm just running out the door
02:08because my eyebrows always look good.
02:10I'm hoping that this procedure will cut down on that amount
02:12of work that I'll need to do.
02:13I hope the expert informs me ahead of time
02:16about the steps of the procedure,
02:18about what's going to happen.
02:19In my journey of tweezing my eyebrows on my own,
02:23I've really given them a shape
02:25that may not be natural to them.
02:28I hope that she's able to take, you know,
02:30what I've been tweezing over the past couple of years
02:32and make it into something beautiful.
02:59We're going to start with the first step,
03:02which is applying a skin barrier.
03:06So it protects the skin from getting any sort of irritation.
03:14I am going to apply the next step.
03:26The next step is what actually breaks down the bond of the hair
03:31so it becomes more pliable.
03:40I'll let that process for about four minutes
03:43and then I will remove the saran to check on her brow hair.
04:10If it seems like the brow hair is not quite pushed down to the skin,
04:16I'm going to want to process it for a little bit longer.
04:31After she processes for one to two more minutes,
04:35I remove that brow product and we apply the next step.
04:43The next step is what is going to lock that brow hair into place.
04:53I apply that and I let it sit for the same amount of time as the last step.
04:58So it's going to process for six minutes.
05:27I will apply a conditioning treatment
05:31to the eyebrows.
05:40Since we did just do a little bit of a chemical treatment on the eyebrows,
05:45we want to make sure that that hair is getting nourished.
05:49I will then ask Mikayla to keep the brow conditioning treatment on for 24 hours.
06:02Wow, they look completely different.
06:04Oh my gosh.
06:06I love it.
06:08After I was done with the treatment, my initial reaction was,
06:12whoa, my eyebrows look very different.
06:15I did not know how strong it was going to be,
06:18whether or not it was going to work on my eyebrows,
06:20my hair type, etc.
06:21But it definitely worked.
06:23So with Mikayla, she definitely had a little bit more of coarse, curly hair.
06:30We had some that were going this way and some that were going that way.
06:33And as she described, she wanted them to all be up and fluffy.
06:38We all want that big brow.
06:40And it's really cool to see people being able just to love themselves for what they have.
06:46Doing these procedures to get that big, fluffy editorial brow that, you know,
06:51maybe somebody was once bullied for.
06:53I felt that out of the three procedures that I know about eyebrows, this being one of them,
06:58this was definitely my favorite.
07:00I thought it was super inclusive to my eyebrow hair type.
07:03She didn't have to leave the room to get a thicker string and try and, you know, thread it correctly.
07:07And I've never tried waxing, but I know that it hurts.
07:11I already know that.
07:12With the aftercare, it's very simple.
07:15As soon as you leave, you can continue on with your day.
07:19We do ask that you keep that brow conditioning treatment on for 24 hours.
07:25And we also recommend that you don't get your eyebrows wet for 24 hours.
07:30You just kind of brush down the tips a little bit.
07:35Shape them to your liking.
07:37And they're still like fluffy, fresh, things like that.
07:40But now it's not us.
07:41You can kind of see the difference between the two brows.
07:44Now it's not us.
07:44Like, I could cut my eyebrows if I want.
07:48I can shape them.
07:49I can see their actual length more.
07:51I can, like, fill them in if I want.
07:52I have so many options.
07:54Thank you for watching Refinery29.
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