Monday confessional: taking the permanent makeup plunge

Yep. I had my eyebrows tattooed!

Remember this post from January where I was hemming and hawing over what to do about my negligent eyebrow hair situation?

If you don't want to click on the link, here's a picture which really needs no explanation:

YIKES.

After some encouraging feedback, I decided to go for it but had to impatiently wait for an online coupon deal to pop up for the place I wanted to go to (recommended by a friend and with excellent online reviews). Once one finally became available in February I called and made an appointment for the same day! (When I'm ready to do something I am READY!) Then I called my sister-in-law, Tricia, and asked her if she wanted to go on an adventure with me :) Tricia is always ready for Jodi-adventures... And like that we were off!

This was the proposed timeline of the appointment as explained by Lindsay, my permanent makeup artist:
- 10 minutes or so to discuss what I want
- 30 minutes to draw them on, adjust as needed, and make sure they're exactly what I want
- 20 minutes to let the numbing gel work
- An hour and 15 minutes approx to do the tattooing
- 5 minutes wait time before leaving.

I made my appointment for 5 pm on Monday, February 10th so there would be no customers after me and figured I'd be out of there by 7:30 pm.

HA.

Apparently I am very opinionated/indecisive about eyebrow shapes because when it hit 7 pm and I was still nitpicking the drawn on version, poor Lindsay basically told me I needed to either get down to business or come back another day.

I almost didn't do it! I'd driven an hour to get there though and truthfully, felt guilty that I'd already wasted two hours of her time, so I squashed my nerves and blurted, "I'm ready". (And then I squeezed my eyes shut and prayed it wouldn't be a disaster while my stomach twisted into a nervous knot.)

And here's one more picture to show you how silly I looked beforehand.

The process: Above you can see the drawn on brows, with an upwards dash at the outer corner to clearly mark the stopping point. The numbing gel worked awesome... the first time over with the tattoo gun. But she had to go back over each brow over and over again, and once that numbing gel was worn off... HOOEY, it hurt! Especially the closer to my nose she got.

After two or three times over she'd numb my brow again and go to the other side, which gave me some much needed relief. In my opinion it was nothing like a regular tattoo (I have a small one on my shoulder blade and it only took 10 minutes!) Permanent makeup is really only semi-permanent (lasting years but not a lifetime) so the process is apparently different. And I was a bit of an extra bleeder so that meant she had to go deeper and over it more times too. All in all it took almost two hours - partly because Lindsay was such a perfectionist! (Something I was very grateful for.)

We finally left at 10 pm, five hours after I'd arrived! I'm smiling in the above pics but seriously, I was in shock. And thus began an hour long freak-out session while Tricia and I drove home. I can tell you though, Tricia was magnificent, the best moral support I could have asked for! By the time we got back home she'd halfway convinced me I hadn't made a giant mistake ;)

Swollen and red but not quite as freaky looking as I was first thinking. After 6-8 weeks permanent makeup fades about 40% and thins by about 30%, so the initial result is quite drastic compared to the final appearance.

Now, I shared one picture on instagram afterwards but I didn't want to write about it here until my eyebrows were all healed up so I could show you a progression of pictures... because that's the fun part!

My first time going out in public.

Celebrating Valentine's. Starting to peel.

Starting to lighten up a bit. Still peeling.

Thinner and lighter.

So you may be wondering, how do I feel about my eyebrows now? 

I love them! I am so happy I did it and can't tell you how much time it saves me not to have to draw my eyebrows on everyday! I am also way less self-conscious than I was before and that alone has made it worth it to me. 

Because I had so little hair to begin with the brushstroke technique was not an option for me (it would turn out looking like zebra stripes). This meant I had to get solid eyebrows, which are not quite as natural looking. I've decided it's infinitely better than what I had though and LOVE the shape. Seriously, so much better than what I was drawing on daily!

Cost: I paid $200 thanks to an online deal (regular price $450) and don't need any touch-up work so I won't need to pay anything else. Yay!

Funny side story: The insides slope down towards my nose more steeply than my old brow shape so for the first couple of weeks Russell kept asking me if something was wrong and if I was upset with him. We figured out it was just my new eyebrows so we started calling them my "angry bird" brows... which for some reason really cracked us both up :)

So that's it! Have any questions? Shoot away!