Your guide to Atlanta’s extreme beauty treatments

Test Drive: Microblading eyebrows at Brow You Doin’

Microblading
Carey Housen of Brow You Doin’

Photograph by Caroline C. Kilgore

Nineties fashion might be back in style—but the era’s overplucked, barely there eyebrows are not. Even though I laid down the tweezers two decades ago, my arches remained more Betty Boop than Brooke Shields. Then I heard about microblading, a semipermanent form of cos­metic tattooing that promised to restore my full brows. I booked an appointment with Carey Housen at Brow You Doin’, which operates inside Only You Tattoo in Grant Park. Housen, who has alopecia, was halfway through nursing school when she decided to study microblading after undergoing the procedure herself.

Once we landed on the perfect shape, Housen made dozens of pinpricks on my brow (this is the only painful part) so that a topical anesthetic could penetrate my skin. Then she used a tool to deposit tiny amounts of custom pigment in precise, hair-like strokes just beneath the skin’s surface. Two and a half hours later, my brows looked fuller than they had since the early 1990s. The healing process lasts about 10 days, and most people require a follow-up appointment to correct any imperfections about six weeks later (included in the $450 price tag). The end result: perfect brows for up to two years, no makeup required. 401 Memorial Drive, 404-394-6490, browyoudoin.com —Jennifer Rainey Marquez