"I gave myself a monobrow to achieve perfect beauty blogger brows."

I was roughly 24 minutes deep into an Instagram beauty blogger makeup tutorials hole when I saw them.

Or more accurately, it.

In the place of two separate eyebrows on a beauty blogger’s face was a single monobrow. The most perfectly manicured monobrow I’d ever seen.

I should point out here that the monobrow was but a step in a longer beauty tutorial to achieve perfect brows.

Precisely painted on with a fine eyeliner brush and outlined with a thick layer of concealer before blending, the monobrow is used by Instagram and YouTube beauty bloggers to create intensely defined brows that fade in from the middle and taper out to a sharp angle at the end.

After my first sighting, the hectic brow and concealer combo were everywhere I looked. The monobrow was a trend.

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Like some people watch videos of people eating pickles or whispering to relax, I quickly became mesmerised – transfixed – by videos of beauty bloggers doing their eyebrows.

I had so many questions. Who came up with this idea? And… why? And why was this not a thing when I had a legit monobrow? 

So, I decided to give it a crack one morning. How hard could it be?

I know now the answer is very.

For comparison’s sake, my day-today eyebrow routine involves lightly outlining my brows with a brow pencil (the Benefit Brow Contour Pro is my got-to) and brushing the product through with a spoolie. It takes all of one minute.

Sometimes I go all out and brush them through with a brow gel, which blows things out to a minute and 15 seconds.

But not today. Today, drawing on my brows à la an Instagram beauty blogger took 20 minutes. TWENTY MINUTESSSSS.

I was parched by the end of it. Had anyone tried to contact me during that time? Had a search party been sent out in my absence? I digress.

To give this monobrow technique a try with my relatively basic makeup skills, I brushed my brows with my spoolie. Next, I used my eyeliner gel pencil to trace slightly above and all the way around the shape of my brows. When I got to the middle bit, I extended the line out and lightly shaded the traditionally sparse gap in between.

The concealer step is where things got dicey. Taking a matte liquid concealer with a tapered wand applicator, I applied concealer directly underneath and above the outline of my brows. The idea is to apply the product just underneath the hairs. I definitely got concealer in my eyebrows. I’d compare it to trying to colour something in on Microsoft Paint with your mouse.

At this stage, you have a monobrow on your face. It’s a look.

Finally, I buffed out the concealer away from my brows and into my skin. To get rid of the monobrow, I used a teeny tiny blending brush to effectively draw two lines through my monobrow (like goal posts on a footy field) before covering up the no man’s land in the middle.

The end result actually looked pretty good. More angular and crisp than my preferred brow look, but I surprised myself with how I was able to salvage my shoddy concealer handiwork.

From afar, my brows resembled those of my favourite Instagram beauty bloggers. Up close was a different story.

No amount of blending and buffing could disguise the thick layer of concealer sitting in the fine lines and pores around my eyes. The concealer also made every stray hair underneath, above, at the ends AND in between my brows look really bloody obvious.

To be fair, it takes a lot of skill, and the right tools and products, to execute this technique. You need a well-matched concealer (mine was the right consistency but a tad too light for my skin tone), a concealer brush and/or buffing brush (I used the really small buffing brush on the other end of my spoolie), and a steady hand to apply the concealer underneath your brows without touching your eyebrow hairs.

Then there's the matter of lighting. The magic of the lights beauty bloggers use when they film their videos is they blur out or reflect light away from imperfections natural lighting picks up (like poor blending or cakey concealer), disguising them for our viewing pleasure.

Sadly, real life seldom comes with good lighting.

To conclude, I will likely never again do my eyebrows like an Instagram beauty blogger. Ever.

This experiment did, however, give me a newfound appreciation for the precision and artistry required to masterfully pull off this kind of makeup technique.

Hence, I shall leave it to the experts.

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