Semi-permanent brows or lamination?

One question settles this, and you already know the answer: have you got brow hair?

Lamination is a perm for your eyebrows. A solution softens the hairs so they can be brushed upwards and set there. Nothing is implanted, no colour is added, and it lasts six to eight weeks — about as long as a brow hair lives. Semi-permanent make-up creates the look of brow where there is none. It fills gaps, builds a shape, and lasts twelve to eighteen months.

Lamination rearranges what you have

If your brows are thick and healthy but stick out in six directions, lamination is cheaper, quicker, and exactly the right answer. Do not buy a tattoo to solve a styling problem.

But if your brows are thin, patchy through the tail, or largely gone through years of plucking, illness or simply age, there is nothing there for lamination to rearrange. Brushing three hairs upwards will not fill a gap.

What it costs over two years

Lamination looks much cheaper per visit, and usually is not once you compare properly.

Around £40 every seven weeks is roughly fifteen appointments across two years. Powder brows at £295, perfecting session included, cover the same two years with one course of treatment and perhaps a boost at the end.

That only matters if semi-permanent make-up is right for you in the first place, mind. If lamination is what you need, Alison will say so.

Plenty of women have both

They work beautifully together and a fair few clients do exactly this — semi-permanent work underneath for shape and density, lamination on top to keep their own hairs sitting where they should.

Leave at least four weeks between them and have the semi-permanent work first. Lamination solution on freshly worked skin is a bad idea, and the shape needs mapping against hair sitting the way it naturally grows.