The Brow Whisperer: How Sania Vucetaj Founded a Family-Led Beauty Empire

Alec Kugler

When did you start to care about your eyebrows? By “care,” I don’t mean plucking them to oblivion when you were in high school. I mean really care about your eyebrows. Shaping them just right to frame your face, searching high and low for the best products, painstakingly drawing on hairs for thickness. Most people can trace their obsession to the past decade. But for Sania Vucetaj, founder of Sania’s Brow Bar, eyebrows have been at the center of her 25-year career.

An early pioneer of the full-brow look, Vucetaj has earned the nickname Eyebrow Angel for her ability to transform them through her tweezer-only shaping method, which promotes follicle health and regrowth. Her work and expertise have appeared in publications like Vogue, Elle, The New York Times, and Forbes, and her namesake salon has stood in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood since 2011, where she’s groomed the brows of celebs like Rihanna, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Camila Cabello.

Before her success, Vucetaj’s brow journey started at a young age. The daughter of Albanian immigrants, she grew up in the Bronx, where she suffered a face injury that changed her life. “I fell down when I was four, and they took me to the hospital and I got stitches,” she tells Glamour. “My cut was right where the brow should be, and I couldn’t grow hair—there was a patch high, and there was a patch low.”

Suddenly she became very aware of how important eyebrows are to a person’s face. The accident shattered her self-confidence. “I struggled for years not wanting to take pictures, always hiding that side of my face,” she says. “I hated my brows, I hated pictures. I knew it changed my whole face. When my sisters would get mad at me, they’d call me a ‘three-browed bitch.’”

It wasn’t until Vucetaj turned 21 that she decided to take matters into her own hands. Tired of letting her scars define her, she picked up her sister’s eyeliner pencil and filled in the patches. “I figured out how to camouflage on my own,” she says. “Once I sat in the mirror, I was like, Which way do I do it? I tried every which way. Once I figured it out and used the pencil, I walked out of that bathroom and there was nothing my sisters could say.”

From then on Vucetaj fell in love with brows and started to build clientele among family and friends. She did this for 12 years while raising a young family. “We had just moved to the city,” she says. “My kids were in school. My husband was the only one working, and he goes, ‘You’re never going to get a job.’ I always loved brows, so I said, ‘Yes, I will.’”

While working at a furniture store, Vucetaj saw a job listing in a magazine for eyebrow waxing at Eliza Eyes, the first dedicated eyebrow-shaping salon. “I was like, Wait, this is a thing?” she says. “I didn’t even realize it was a thing. I called them up and said, ‘Where do I get my license?’”

Vucetaj attended 10 months of aesthetics school while balancing work and being a mother. She shared her dream of one day owning her own brow salon, and her teachers were incredulous. “They told me for the whole 10 months, ‘You’ll never make it just tweezing. There’s no such thing as brow salons,’” she says.

It didn’t take long for Vucetaj to prove her teachers wrong. Shortly after graduation she came across another job listing in The New York Times—this time for a “brow specialist—tweezing only.”

After sending in her résumé, Vucetaj learned it was for the salon at Bergdorf Goodman, a luxury department store on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue. Unaware of its elite status, she got the job. During her time at Bergdorf in the early ’00s, she encountered New York’s upper echelon. Most had never gotten their eyebrows done before and certainly hadn’t seen Vucetaj’s grooming style: tweezers only, with full brows and natural-looking hairs.

“People would ask, ‘Why fuller?’” she says. “But the trend was never thin. That’s where people misunderstand. There was no reason or rhyme behind brows. They would just get them waxed.”

Instead, Vucetaj pointed to international beauty pageants and the brows of Eastern European and South American women. “Beauty pageants were big then,” she says. “I’d say, ’Look, Eastern European women and South American women are known to be so gorgeous and glamorous. It’s the brows!’ The American women had these skinny brows and they wouldn’t stand out.”

Since Vucetaj was the store’s first brow specialist, she had no space to work with clients. Instead she was instructed to walk around the floor and offer her services to people getting manicures and pedicures. “Sometimes I’d get a bite,” she says. “I had Michael Bloomberg walking by. Kathie Lee Gifford would walk by. They would say, ‘Wait, what is this?’ And they’d watch the results out in the open.”

Soon magazines started calling Vucetaj for interviews. She developed great relationships with editors such as Allure founding editor Linda Wells; Cosmopolitan editor in chief Kate White; O, The Oprah Magazine beauty director Val Monroe; and Lucky editor in chief Eva Chen.

Two and a half years into the job at Bergdorf, Vucetaj was thriving. Brands were pushing products at her in hopes she would use them on clients. Despite her success, she constantly found herself in a Goldilocks situation when it came to products.

“I would try everything they had, and I didn’t like anything,” she says. “Pencils would outline the brows, but you couldn’t fill the inside. I would have to use a powder, but it wouldn’t outline. Then the pencil color was another issue, because shades would be too red, too brown, too black.”

Most people at the peak of success would prefer to sit tight and reap the benefits. But Vucetaj was a founder at heart. She knew she had to leave to create the product she needed.

“When I left Bergdorf, everyone said, ‘What are you doing? You have a safety net. You are in a good place,’” she says. “They kept saying, ‘But what if?’ My safety net was that I’m in New York City. There are a million salons, and I could always go work somewhere else.”

After passing a For Rent sign on 56th Street, Vucetaj decided it was time to bet on herself. In 2005 she opened her first brow salon, offering her specialized tweezing services. Here, Vucetaj enforced her eyebrow commandments: no waxing, threading, or micro-blading (which Vucetaj says damages hairs and inhibits regrowth), and no brow gels or pomades (which can clog follicles and cause breakage).

After moving to the Chelsea location in 2011, she set out to create the perfect brow pencil. With years of testing different products, Vucetaj knew exactly what she wanted. It took all of six months to develop The Brow Pencil—the first to ever feature an angled tip—which has been used by the likes of Kourtney Kardashian, Zendaya, and Cindy Crawford.

Sania’s Brow Bar The Brow Pencil

$30.00, Sania's Brow Bar

Vucetaj’s brow pencil has been made by the same manufacturer in Korea for more than a decade. The formula is exclusive to Sania’s Brow Bar, but other brands have since copied her angled pencil tip.

“We’re such a small business, and copycats are waiting,” she says. “It’s easier to follow our lead. Since our brow pencil launched, 35 companies and counting have created the angled tip. But they still can’t get the texture or the colors right.”

While The Brow Pencil is a bestseller on Revolve, Vucetaj has spent years trying to get her product on the shelves of other major beauty retailers like Sephora and Ulta. But with the rise of social media, it’s become increasingly difficult to get shelf space. Instead of seeing the value in a good product, retailers are now prioritizing metrics like followers, views, and engagement. Vucetaj hasn’t even been able to sell her brow pencil at Bergdorf Goodman, where she started her career.

“I was at Bergdorf Goodman before Neiman Marcus bought it, and they were selling my pencil,” she says. “Neiman Marcus bought it out, social media started, and it was dog-eat-dog. Nobody would carry our pencil.”

It’s become a common hurdle for most independent beauty-brand founders, who have struggled to grab attention from retailers amid the rise of celebrity beauty brands, influencers, and sponsored content. “All the publicity I’ve gotten from day one has been organic,” she says. “I’ve never paid for anything.”

In addition to being independently owned, Sania’s Brow Bar is also family operated. Val, Vucetaj’s eldest daughter, joined the business after graduating college in 2010. She now serves as head of product development and manages the second Sania’s Brow Bar location in Scarsdale, New York, which opened in 2021.

“My mom doesn’t get complacent,” Val says. “She’s never at a point where she’s like, ‘Okay, that’s close enough.’ She’s always thinking, What next? But it also comes from passion. She really genuinely loves brows.”

Suzy, Vucetaj’s middle daughter, is currently finishing a doctoral program at New York University and works as head of marketing and public relations but will soon take on a new role as CEO. Sania’s Brow Bar will start fundraising this spring to expand locations and create brand awareness.

“My mom is such a trailblazer,” Suzy says, crediting Vucetaj’s tenacity as the driving force of the business. “She doesn’t care what people say, what people think. She knows what she wants and she goes for it. She’s never taken no for an answer.”

As social media continues to dominate the beauty industry, Suzy and Val have encouraged their mother to take a more forward-facing role. Despite her success, Sania Vucetaj prefers not to flaunt her celebrity clientele—or the fact that she helped pioneer the brow category.

“I’m like, ‘Mom, you’re the OG. You know what you’re doing!’” says Suzy. “She’s confident in the work, but you have to own it sometimes. She’s always been like that. But I think that’s where we’re a good balance to her—we bring that out in different ways.”

That’s not to say Sania Vucetaj doesn’t give herself credit. She recognizes the legacy she’s built—and the women who have lifted her up along the way. “I really came from nothing,” she says. “My kids grew up with very little, but we tried to give them a good life. I was so lucky that I was in a female-dominated industry. If I was in a male industry, I don’t know if it would’ve been the same thing. I’m so grateful to all the women who believed in me.”

And yes, that sentiment also includes Vucetaj’s sisters, whose girlhood bullying ultimately paid off: “Now they tell me, ‘We deserve credit, because we used to hound you about your eyebrows!’”

By Women

As part of our ongoing By Women series, we present our second annual editor-curated shopping list that highlights 100 great things to buy now, all from women-owned brands across fashion, beauty, home, and wellness.

Ariana Yaptangco is the senior beauty editor at Glamour. Follow her @arianayap.

Originally Appeared on Glamour