A few years ago eyebrows were just eyebrows. An arch of hair above ones eye which would be suitably groomed/plucked at home or in the confines of a salon to avoid the dreaded monobrow. Now, brows are big business with numerous brow products hitting cosmetic stands and express brow bars popping up in the likes of Superdrug, Debenhams and now even Primark will be offering brow grooming on the go/whilst you shop for your Saturday night outfit.

The term HD Brows (High Definition Brows) have become more or less a house hold name to those brow lovers amongst us. With dedicated HD Brow salons popping up around the country, a popular cosmetic lines dedicated to brow grooming and celebrity seals of approval, its no surprise that your salon next door is getting in on the action. Most high street beauticians offer your standard eyebrow tint and shaping but HD Brows are much more than a treatment but have also become a signature style.

I’d been wanting to get officially HD Brow-d for years but HD Brows in Stoke-on-Trent had been a little hard to come by. Fear not, bushy browed Stokies, for The Lash and Nail Queen (@LashNailQueen on Twitter) is now offering the celebrity favoured treatment. I was asked to go along and learn about the infamous multi step procedure to get the perfect brow AND get mine done in the process and I couldn’t wait (I even managed to stop my twitchy plucky fingers from grooming them myself… just about).

I tend to hate beauty appointments and hairdressers alike, but The Lash and Nail Queen is Clare is not only extremely informative but is also extremely personable and friendly and made me feel completely at ease from start to finish. My HD Brows experience had begun with a patch test 48 hours prior to my appointment to ensure that the dye didn’t cause my face to balloon or my eyebrows to fall off completely. Thankfully, they didn’t.

I hot footed it to Clare’s salon straight from work one evening where we began my appointment with a consultation where I was asked what I wanted from HD Brows and what I liked about my eyebrows. We then discussed the aesthetics of how I would like my brows to look including the shape (rounded), colour (dark brown), thickness (medium).

Lay on my back on a beauty couch with my eyebrows naked and ready for the taking I found myself feeling undoubtedly vulnerable and nervous. What if this were to be a repeat of the threading episode of 2013 where my lovingly “grown out” brows were threaded to within an inch of their life? What if I left here with the eyebrow equivalent of a brazilian wax?  I needn’t have worried. Clare put my racing heart right at ease as she talked me through each step of the treatment including plotting the desired brow shape, dying the brows, threading, waxing and plucking until the desired shape was achieved. I felt incredibly relaxed throughout (I weirdly enjoy the threading sensation) and Clare helped by punctuating any of those awkward “beauty treatment” silences you tend to experience when someone is a matter of inches from your face.

The whole experience took around 45 minutes in total, less than an episode of Downton Abbey. For my first HD Brows treatment we erred on the side of caution when it came to the darkness and severity of the shape of the brows. Through the “brow shape plotting” Clare established that a little “growing in” would be needed in order to achieve my perfect brow shape as well as noting that my right brow falls a little sparser than the left which means it would require more makeup TLC than my left (I choose the HD Brows Pro Palette* to define).

So how do my HD Brows fair “in the real world”?

There’s definitely a noticeable difference in how my face looks sans le makeup now that my brows are properly defined.  When it comes to my everyday makeup routine (which doesn’t consist of much bar the basics considering I choose extra Zzzz’s in bed over fancy eyeliner flicks) I find I do still fill my brows in a little especially where my new brow shape is “growing in” but I’m certain this is more down to a fine tuned makeup routine rather than needing to.

The Lash and Nail Queen offers HD Brows for £27 and are currently offering a £5 recommend a friend promotion. As well as HD Brows there are a number of other treatments available including LVL Lashes (the ultimate in fabulous lashes – review to come!), Shrinking Violet body wraps and Shellac nails. For more information, take a look at their website.