Eyebrows & Lashes

Well technically, eyelashes are still hairs that henna can bind to. Should you let un-sterilized, botanical mud that has been mixed with lemon juice or vinegar sit for hours anywhere close to your eyes? No...
Please, don’t trust the “henna eyelash / eyebrow tinting” that is offered in salons. Even if it’s an “Eco” or “Natural” salon. It’s not henna! It’s the same concentrated PPD that’s in chemical hair dye & used as “black henna” – you know, the illegal stuff to use in Canada because it’s so toxic?
Save your sight but using a fabulous mascara, use false lashes or explore the option of eyelash extensions offered by certified aestheticians.

Please start be reading the instructions on How to Henna Your Hair.
Always do a small test patch somewhere on your skin first to ensure you are not naturally allergic to these botanical powders.

Using henna to create “tattooed eyebrows”
If you found this article specifically searching for hennaing your skin to tattoo eyebrows where you have no hair, here are the facts:

• Henna stains the skin on the face a very light orange. (Because the skin is thin). It won’t stain the dark red-browns & deep auburns you see on the hands or feet.
• The henna paste needs to be on the skin for 4 - 8 hours
• The henna stain will only last ~3 days on the face.
• you can mix henna with indigo to make a brownish stain, BUT it will be green-blue for the first 12 hours until the henna oxidizes enough to change the colour towards brown. It take a full day for the colour to not look weird (on fair skin). Then you'll have a full day of brown before you have to henna again. If you henna the skin every other evening for 2 - 4 hours (say 16 hours before you're in public again), you should be able to maintain a consistent brown stain on the skin.

So, let’s go back to the totally doable eyebrows 😊
Eyebrows are coloured the exact same way as the hair on your head (or other parts of your body – I’m not judging!).
See my instructions on henna'ing the hair :)

The only difference is that you’ll have to be more careful about not letting the henna paste stain on the surrounding skin.

So this is how I do it:
I prefer to apply with a cone – it’s much cleaner. I outline my eyebrows staying *within* the hair line. Ie: the paste is touching the very outside edge of the hair line, but not outside of the eyebrow altogether. Then I use the tip of my cone like an eyebrow pencil and feather from bottom to top to fill in under my hairs in my eyebrow. (I have very sparse eyebrows, so I fill in under them first, staining the skin). Then I push the hair down into the paste I laid underneath the brows. Then I add more paste over the brows to make sure no hair is exposed.

If you want to use a brush:
Use a very stiff, short eyeshadow brush. Angled is helpful.
As soon as you make a mistake or are finished, do any clean up needed with a damp Q-tip.
I don’t cover my eyebrows with plastic wrap as the head should be covered. Any time I attempted to, the paste bled & made a streaky stain mess around the brows. Instead, I just make sure that the paste stays moist by:
a) doing a non-drippy workout or cleaning the house fast enough to get hot
b) misting the paste periodically – but it has to be a super fine mister and not enough to cause drips
c) dabbing paste with a wet cotton pad.
d) gardening in the back yard on a hot summer day.

Yes, your skin will stain, but only for about 3 days.
This is the tricky part. I get so many calls from customers wanting to henna on eyebrows, but henna behaves differently on the skin than the hair.
The skin on the face is very thin. That means that the henna only stains a light orange to light freckle colour.

Red Hair:
If you want pure henna red eyebrows to match your henna’ed red hair, your skin under your eyebrows will be VERY orange for a few days. Not red like your hair. ORANGE.
If you have blonde hair that you’ve henna’ed red & want to colour your eyebrows to match, keep in mind that eyebrows tend to be lighter in colour for blondes (same is true for natural strawberry blondes & some redheads). You will need a darker colour mix than you use on your head. Ex: My natural hair colour is a medium honey blonde, but my eyebrows are white blonde (I looked like a troll doll). Pure henna on my head gives me a rich, dark red, but if I use pure henna on my eyebrows, they will be a bright orange. We’re talking clown orange. So if I wanted red eyebrows, I would actually do an auburn or auburn-brown mix on my eyebrows. (But I’m an extroverted eccentric, so I just go black 😉).
**Remember: Just like with body art & the hair on your head, it will take 2 days for the henna dye on the eyebrows to oxidize to the final colour. So, for the first 12 hours after dyeing your eyebrows a darker auburn mix, they will still be bright orange for at least 12 hours.

Browns:
Using the 1 step brown mixes: Indigo stains the skin right away, but it takes 48 hours for henna to oxidize. That means that the skin under your eyebrows will be a greenish-blue until the henna starts to oxidize. The skin should start looking something close to brown in about 12 hours. For this reason, i highly recommend that you henna your eyebrows on an evening that you're not going out. But, by the time the skin oxidizes to a decent brown, you only have one day of colour.
Your hair will be entirely different than the skin underneath: the red will be more obvious oxidizing throug variations of red - auburn - light brown in the meantime. 

2 step for a faster Brown or Black:
My fav. is the 2 step black process. Colour is final right away and I don’t have to fill in my eyebrows with a pencil for 3 – 4 days. I have succeeded in getting a dark brown instead of jet black by only keeping the indigo on for 15 - 20 minutes instead of an hour.  You can experiment with the timing, but the hair comes to a brown much faster & the skin is never blue-green!

Using henna over ink tattooed eyebrows:
I had a very stressed out woman call me in desperation for a fix. Having very thin, sparse eyebrows, she decided to have cosmetic tattooing done to fill them in. As with all ink tattoos, the ink eventually blows out & fades. In her case, her perfectly coloured brown ink eyebrows had turned into a grayish green. She had them touched up as many times as is possible… Of course, they just did the same colour fade every time. For a few years she was using an eyebrow pencil to colour over the ink for a normal dark brown, but this meant running to a bathroom to touch up or re-apply every time she touched around her eyes or she was sweaty. She heard of henna and hoped it would work. I warned her that the henna will only stain a light orange on her fair, thin face, so I don’t know if it will work… But it did! The orange henna stain over the greenish ink tattoo = a brown colour. Yes, she had to reapply the henna for 4 hours every other night before bed, but apparently that was better than having to touch up makeup every few hours.

I hope this has helped!
As always,
Happy Henna’ing!