I pretty much swore off contouring when people started using bananas and scissors to define their cheekbones, so you can imagine my giant eye roll when the phrase "brow contouring" started floating around the internet. Despite my skepticism, the technique is the main star of a new Benefit Cosmetics Brow Contour Pro, a 4-in-1 eye pencil that's meant to define, highlight, contour, and fill in your eyebrows. And no surprise here: The Internet is obsessed.
The pencil looks similar to the Lisa Frank click-pen I owned in the late '90s — each little trigger releases a different eyebrow pencil for one of the four brow tasks. Quite frankly, the gimmick itself was enough to make me try it out to see what all the hype was about.
The brow pencil comes in five different shade options, but being a fake blonde, I choose Blonde Light.
RELATED: 3 of These $38 Highlighters Are Sold Every Minute
The pencil looks intimidating at first, but it comes along with a helpful little picture that illustrates where to use each color. The lighter brown shade is meant to fill in the beginning to the middle of the brow. This creates a more natural look, as brows are a little more sparse, and therefore lighter, towards the front. The darker brown shade is meant for the arch to the ends of the brow. The defining pencil is meant to be traced around the perimeter of the brow, and helps create a more defined, precise brow shape. The highlighter pencil is used underneath the brow to create a glow and bring even more attention to your new masterpiece. It's priced at $34, which I would consider steep if it was only one pencil.
Once you press a trigger to release the pencil you desire, you have to turn the tip of the pencil to release the pigment. Maybe I'm heavy-handed, but I had to turn it multiple times to keep a sharp tip while filling in my brows. Even so, the filling in process was relatively foolproof. I thought the pigment looked natural and effectively filled in my sparse spots.
(The left photo shows my completed brows with the Benefit Cosmetics Brow Contour Pro. The right photo shows my bare brows)
RELATED: I'm Calling It: This Will Be the Most Popular Mask for Fall
I already knew the defining pencil was going to be useless for me. I prefer a wispy, slightly messy, over-grown brow, so I didn't really want to define my arches anymore than they already were. I did, however, make use of the highlighting pencil. I drew a tiny line underneath my brows and blended it in with my fingertips for an added glow.
My major complaint is that the pencil doesn't come with a blending spoolie, which sucked because I didn't pack one in my cosmetics case. If I didn't use my fingertip to smudge the pigment around and top my brows off with a clear brow gel, it would have been pretty obvious I skipped the step.
It's an impressive beauty invention, and I actually get brow contouring now. To be honest, I have no patience, so I'd probably only use one of the four shades on a daily basis. But hey: If you're all about that brow or contour more than Kim K., it's meant for you.