DIY: Tinted Brow Gel

this was a random whim of mine, one late night i spent in bed watching a particularly grueling episode of my favorite crime drama. i was siting there thinking, i really need a tinted brow gel like, NOW. so i got my materials ready (it’s a project i’ve been meaning to do for weeks) and got to work.

before i get to the process, let me answer a question that may be on your mind: WHY make your own tinted brow gel??

well i’ve been getting my hair consistently dyed for over two years now, and it is always a pain having to dye my eyebrows as well (plus it’s not the safest thing to do). i hate having to see the mismatched hair-and-brow scenario in my bathroom mirror and just too darn cheap to invest in a tinted gel since i find those too costly. i am quite low-maintenance with my brows so spending that much dough was always out of the question.

so i collected the basic materials needed for this DIY: clear mascara gel, old/cheap matte brown eyeshadow you’re willing to “dispose of” (i had to buy a new one since all my matte brown eyeshadows are MAC hehe), a cutter and some little scraps of paper.

first i gently scraped off the eyeshadow with my cutter onto a piece of paper. i started with a small-ish amount since i wasn’t sure how much i was going to need.

next i made a tiny makeshift funnel with one of my paper sheets for transferring the powder.

this method works okay, but kind of slow since the pointy tip of the paper funnel causes very little powder to go through. eventually i gave up and just used the corners of the opened sheet of paper to transfer the eyeshadow. it’s honestly not a difficult thing to do, but if you are impatient (as i tend to be sometimes haha) it can be somewhat unnerving waiting for the gel to get some color.

every time i’d fill the brim with eyeshadow i’d pause and dip the mascara wand back into the tube and swirl it around to mix the powder with the gel. every so often i would test the mixture on my hand to see if there is already enough color in. this is where i realized that the eyeshadow i bought had so little pigmentation (what did i expect from a P50 product?) that even after transferring a good amount of powder, there was barely any color showing up on my hand — or even white paper for that matter.

i remembered i had an old cream eyeshadow duo, so i decided to mix in some of the dark color into the gel as well. this time i just scraped it with the brush and dipped it back into the tube. after several dippings and swirlings, the color finally started showing up on swatches.

eventually i ended up with a color/pigmentation i was semi-satisfied with (still really quite far from what i anticipated) and i’ve been using it since.

i used the tinted gel in my recent photo above, although admittedly with the help of a pencil liner underneath. i find that they compliment each other really well and meet my eyebrow-grooming needs at the moment. i may still decide to redo this DIY, but definitely with a better pigmented eyeshadow. or hey, i may just bite the bullet and get one of those expensive thingamajigs.