How to Get Angelina Jolie’s Perfect Brows

The thing about being a beauty junkie is that you're allowed to be a novice. It's not about turning into a highlight-obsessed Bergdorf Blonde or investing your 401K in indulgent anti-aging treatments. Personally, I think it means actively exploring what you like and what makes you feel good, being scrappy about saving dough, and basically making that whole commercial beauty enterprise work for you. But then again, I'm a novice. I happen to be a lucky junkie and can get my fix of the next big beauty obsession thanks to the nature of my job; but I never obsess or buy into every promised-land product that comes my way. To be honest, homemade scrubs and a 10-minute morning routine puts me in the "low maintenance" bracket. Except when it comes to one thing: eyebrows. I am diligently obsessed and frequently frustrated with my eyebrows, though for some reason I have never fronted the time or money to see an actual professional brow-shaper. Until I found Sue Ellen Gifford at the Pierre Michel Salon, that is.

Mind you, most midtown salons give me the shivers. Even in the dead of summer, there’s sometimes enough coolness and turned-up noses in a glitzy Central Park salon to feel like New York in January. I prefer to kick around the familiar and friendly East Village to get pretty, but Gifford’s resume included some of the brows I was in the closet about worshiping (Angelina Jolie, Megan Fox), so I thought I’d make the hike with my winter jacket buttoned up.

What a pleasant surprise. The newly reopened 8,000-square-foot salon was more bustling and boisterous than stuffy and rigid. And Sue Ellen Gifford did not look down on my fear of handing over my well-kept brows to a stranger. But she didn’t want me to ruin her reputation either. “I need a customer to commit to me, especially one that is plucking and picking every stray hair obsessively,” she says, her chatty manner suddenly stern. “I need to know that you can commit to seeing me every four weeks so we can work on the shape together. If I can tell that someone has compromised my vision for what the shape should be, I turn them away for another four weeks and we start over.”

I promised to keep my picking to a minimum and we began. She measured my eyebrows with my features, lining up a small stick. To my dismay, my eyebrows are “wrong”—asymmetrical I swallow my pride and she draws out her regimen. No plucking the center of my brows. Lower my over-plucked arches. I’m sort of pissed, thinking that my eyebrows were just starting to look good—what does she know? But her demeanor is so professional and comforting, I let her wax away using a virtually pain-free lavender wax she brought with her from the days she worked at Trump Tower. “You look a little like Uma Thurman, she comes here too.”

The waxing is quick, and then she grooms my brows and uses a pencil as I wait to see them in the mirror. Perfection. I have never seen my brows look so perfect. They fit my face; the brow that usually grows a bit cock-eyed due to a childhood scar (running with pencils) is smooth and even with its mate. But there’s more. Knowing that every person has an imperfect brow (until they see Gifford on a regular basis), she shows me the proper technique to shaping your brows with makeup at home. I was certainly doing it wrong.