This Best-Selling Eyebrow Pencil Shapes My Brows Better Than Threading

In middle school, I invited my best friend over to do our makeup together for fun. We put on bright-blue eyeshadow and powder-pink blush — a combo that should be illegal — while wearing Limited Too t-shirts and striped fingerless gloves. I thought I looked great, but like most sassy, judgemental, no-filter middle schoolers do, my best friend roasted me abruptly. According to her, my eyebrows were “too big.” After her parents picked her up, I went to cry in my bedroom while dramatically listening to Evanescence’s Bring Me To Life.

For months I begged my mom to let me tweeze my eyebrows to the point of no return, but she wouldn’t let me. She told me I’d regret it and I listened to her with restraint that I am now incredibly grateful for. Big, thick eyebrows like mine are actually desirable now and the kind of razor-thin, barely-there ones that were popular in the ‘90s are met with fear, mostly because they rarely grow back. When Rihanna graced the cover of British Vogue in August of 2018 with skinny brows, the internet immediately freaked out over the prospect of her bringing the extreme beauty trend back. If anyone could do it, Rihanna can, but thankfully the skinny brow train hasn’t really caught much traction.

Instead everyone seems to want to make their eyebrows appear as bushy and full as possible, myself included. Because my hair in general is pretty unruly, I’ve recently needed to invest in some eyebrow care, even though I’ve spent a majority of my life not touching them. The key is, I want them to be thick but to have a more refined shape instead of each individual eyebrow hair pointing in whichever direction it pleases. And that is exactly how I found myself addicted to eyebrow threading, which is just as painful as it sounds.

Despite the sting, I love eyebrow threading. But the only woman I trust to touch my eyebrows is not conveniently located near my apartment. There are weeks — sometimes even months, when time gets away from me — when I really can’t squeeze in time to go see her, and I’m left desperate for a solution. I love Glossier’s Boy Brow just as much as the next person, but if I really want my brows to have that just-threaded sharp edge, I need more. After searching high and low for a hero eyebrow product, I discovered Anastasia Beverly Hills Brow Wiz Mechanical Brow Pencil and I love it more than I thought I could ever love something with the word Wiz in the name.

Anastasia Beverly Hills Brow Wiz Mechanical Brow Pencil came highly recommended to me from multiple celebrity makeup artists, but it wasn’t until I saw its nearly perfect five-star rating with over 900 reviews on Nordstrom that I really felt like I was missing out on something. Everyone who has ever used it swears by it and I knew I needed to try it out.

Brow Wiz is built like a mechanical pencil and it works to shape, define, and fill in your brows. It has a spoolie brush on the other end that’ll easily blend your brows in the most natural way. When my brows need a touch-up or I just want to accentuate them more, I draw a light outline around the edges and fill in any sparse areas with the pencil. At first it looks bizarre, as if I’ve just used a crayon, but once I start to use the spoolie brush to blend it all in, it looks like I was born that way. I’ve also used it to elongate the tip of my eyebrow and extend the arc a bit. Brow Wiz makes my eyebrows look as though they’ve just been threaded and shaped, but it only takes me approximately three minutes to apply.

Even if I do find the time to get my eyebrows threaded, which I do at least once in a good month, I still run the pencil over my eyebrows for that extra oomph. It makes them look incredible and so thick that I feel confident enough to leave the house without mascara on — and that is huge for me since I rarely ever do that. Back when I was twelve, I would have never thought I’d want to make my brows as big as possible, but here I am, swearing by the greatest eyebrow pencil that ever was. And now I know that there’s definitely no such thing as “too big” when it comes to brows.

Shop the best-selling Anastasia Beverly Hills Brow Wiz Mechanical Brow Pencil at Nordstrom below.

Anastasia Beverly Hills Brow Wiz Mechanical Brow Pencil

Shop now: $23; nordstrom.com