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For years we've been told that good eyebrows are essential to any enviable makeup look. Drag queens know that better than anyone, going so far as to completely mask their own brows so they can draw better, more exaggerated ones on top.
"It transforms your face," Miss Toto, a drag queen based in Miami, says. "In the process of drag or any makeup look, you want to create more surface area. Removing your brow changes the game. If I didn’t have a job other than drag, I would shave my brows off."
While some drag queens do indeed shave their eyebrows off entirely in order to make doing the rest of their makeup easier, most others resort to simply gluing theirs down. But that's easier said than done, as we saw when we attended a drag makeup class earlier this year. "It's one of the more difficult steps," Toto says. "It’s a step where people can learn everything else or even be an amazing makeup artist, but if you don't know how to glue your brows down, the look won’t be cohesive."
That explains why "how to glue down eyebrows" was near the top of Google's 10 trending beauty questions of 2018. And though drag queens deserve the credit for the technique, they're certainly no longer the only people doing it —which explains the spike in interest. "If you’re doing any special effects or anything in which you're transforming your face, you're going to want to glue down your brows," says Toto. "If you're just going out and turning looks, I say go for it."
Just like there's no one way to be a drag queen, there's no one way to glue down your brows either. While some use a tacky, professional-level substance called Pros-Aide or an adhesive called Spirit Gum, others like Toto prefer the kind of glue stick you stashed in your desk in elementary school. According to Toto, it's the easiest way to glue down your brows in less than 15 minutes, allowing ample time for you to paint on the rest of your face. Ahead, she runs through her entire routine.
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