Had your brows done before?

Consultation

1. The client sent me a picture of her brows. They seemed more faded in pictures than in person, but they were still pigmented enough for me to want to see them in person before committing.
2. The client came in for an in-person consultation. The old microblading was pigmented, and I noticed there were two different tails from the old microblading. They were a bit faded in the picture, but if you look closely, you’ll see red tails coming from the same body. As an artist, I’m flabbergasted that someone would do that to their client.
3. What I recommend: I always highly recommend that anyone with an old brow tattoo get laser tattoo removal before getting a new set, especially if they’re going to a different artist for a different brow procedure. If the client doesn’t want to, then I give them options:

Option 1: Color-correct with powder brows.

Option 2: Create hairstrokes and do some light shading, with color correction, to cover the old color that shows through the hairstrokes.

4. The client was okay with the conditions.

Mapping

• What the client needs to understand: There’s only so much we can do as artists to fix the shape and size of an old tattoo unless they get laser or saline removal.
• Because of the old microblading—the unevenness and two tails on both brows—the only way to match them as evenly as possible was to go thicker. That was what the client wanted anyway, so it was perfect.
• Issue: The two tails were creating a problem. Even if we mapped the brows thicker, the tails would still show a little. If we covered both, the shape would not be pretty and would not match her face.
• Solution: The top tails were more faded than the bottom ones, and the client was okay with them showing a little.

Procedure

• If her old microblading had been really deep in the skin and created scar tissue, I probably would have told her to get removal first, or I wouldn’t have touched it. Not to be rude, but because my goal is to make people’s lives better and easier by giving them good results—not to give them more scar tissue to deal with along with patchy hairstrokes.
• This client surprisingly didn’t have much scar tissue. She still had some, but I was able to work with it.
• Initial session: Just hairstrokes with bigger gaps between each stroke. A new tattoo on top of an old tattoo can cause pigment migration, also known as smudging.

We started very minimally to see how it would heal and planned to add more during the touch-up.