To say my eyebrows have always been lush would be polite. When I was growing up, they were bushy, and not in the cool Boy Brow kind of way. I have dark, thick hair—and the brows to match. Case in point: Back in middle school a guy once told me, “Your eyebrows are just so masculine,” and I went home and cried. My mother plied me with photos of Brooke Shields and told me how lucky I was. But in all of my favorite magazines all I saw were hyper-tweezed shots of Gwen Stefani, Drew Barrymore, and Nicole Richie, which made me dream of having dainty little crescent moons above my eyes.

But then something amazing happened. In 2011, Cara Delevingne hit the scene, and suddenly eyebrows weren’t something to minimize. Instead, they were on fleek. Celebrities everywhere began growing theirs out to stay au courant, and in fashion the mentality was the bushier, the better. My brows became my secret weapon, not my shame.

And while I have Delevingne to thank for helping me own my look, these days I have a new brow icon. None other than Meghan Markle. The shape! The thickness! Hers are total perfection. So it’ll come as no surprise that when I was visiting London earlier this month, one of the first stops on my itinerary was the famous salon where the Duchess gets her eyebrows done.

However, when I got to Nails & Brows, the black-owned boutique in the ultra-luxe neighborhood of Mayfair, I learned that it’s not the Markle that its customers flock to the salon for, it’s the Audrey. When Sherrille Riley founded the salon in 2014, she unveiled its signature brow treatment, which is inspired by Audrey Hepburn. “The Audrey consists of a straight, archless brow that tapers out toward your temple. The sculpt instantly lifts your face and creates a fresh and youthful appearance,” she tells me. And it’s the style that Meghan Markle always requests when visiting the salon. I was sold.

When my time came, they took me upstairs where I laid back on a plush white leather chair (airy, monochromatic accents is very much the aesthetic of the salon) beside a series of regulars—one who was getting married over the weekend and made sure to stop in before her big day. As the woman chatted about her upcoming nuptials, my stylist set to work measuring the dimensions of my face (I have been getting my brows done since I was 11 and never once has someone taken the time to actually make sure my brows were proportionate to the rest of my face). Using a piece of thread, she measured from my nostril to the bottom corner of my brow, and kindly told me that the length was too long and that I need to “take some hair off the sides.” The trick, she says, is to extend the string from your nostril to the outer edge of your eye—wherever that line hits on your brow is where the tail should end.

Overall it took them 40 minutes of threading, tweezing, filling in, and highlighting to give my brows that magic Meghan Markle/Audrey Hepburn realness—and I’ve never loved them more. So here’s my gift to you, a breakdown of exactly what they did, plus a few tricks for bringing out the best in your brows. Spoiler: It requires a lot of brushing.

Step 1:
Take a brow brush—Riley recommends using the Beauty Edit Mayfair Brow Styler—and thread or tweeze your brows in a straight line, while following their natural shape. Remember: The Audrey is all about bringing your brow up and making it archless.

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