Watch Lena Dunham Get Her Thirteenth Tattoo—on Her Eyebrows

It's called microblading.

By Avery Matera, Self

Lena Dunham is all about eyebrows. The actress confessed in her memoir, Not That Kind of Girl, “I over-tweezed my eyebrows like every child of the '90s and am now stuck with what my sister calls 'balding caterpillars.’” So to achieve the power brows of her dreams, she decided to try microblading, a new trend in eyebrow beauty. And, to our delight, she penned an essay for Vogue about microblading and filmed her appointment so we could see what it's all about.

[post_ads]In a nutshell, Dunham describes the procedure: "A semipermanent tattoo where small amounts of pigment are placed under the skin using a sharp and flat handheld tool." Basically, it's an eyebrow tattoo. She says microblading is done by experts, who "take pains to draw in each missing eyebrow hair for an effect that resembles a trompe-l’oeil arch."

Typically, a microblading technician uses a manual pen instead of a traditional permanent makeup machine to ensure precision. With 11 needles at its tip, the pen infuses dye into the skin, but in an ultra-controlled manner. For the most part, it's finished after one appointment—but sometimes it's recommended that a patient returns after a month to fix any unforeseen gaps and add a second dimension of color. Most microblading will last for about three years before it needs to be done again.

[post_ads]Dunham headed to New York’s swanky Core Club, where permanent makeup artist Dominique Bossavy worked on her brows. The actress says she went into the experience with perhaps the same reservations we all have about microblading. She writes: "While I have no qualms about tattoos—I currently have 12—I have distinctly ungenerous associations with permanent makeup, inextricably tied to a hairdresser I used in middle school with a creepy plum-colored line drawn around her mouth for eternity, and women with Marilyn moles they’ve committed to for life." But she goes on to say, "I didn’t just want this: I needed it."

Dunham describes the experience as "less painful than a sunburn and utterly delightful," so we’re definitely feeling a little more at ease on the needles-on-our-face front. As for the results, Dunham was beyond thrilled. Her reaction to the final product of the 40-minute event? "When I finally sat up, I was too stunned to speak," she writes. "On my face were two perfect brows, the same hard-to-capture brown as the hair on my head, multidimensional, thick in all the right places, giving my face a grounded seriousness I had been wishing for since that day in the bathroom almost 20 years ago."

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Her review: overwhelmingly positive. If your brows are feeling a little thin—and you’re looking for a more natural and semipermanent solution than an eyebrow pencil—maybe microblading is the answer.

Watch Dunham's microblading experience in the video below.

Related:

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