Permanent makeup gone wrong

If you are reading this having just looked in the mirror at brows you hate, the first thing worth saying is that almost nothing here is permanent in the way you are afraid it is. Pigment fades. Colour can be shifted. Shape can usually be worked with. The panic you feel on day three is almost never proportionate to the actual situation.

The second thing is that most permanent makeup that gets corrected was not done badly on the day. It was done to a shape that suited a face ten years ago, in a pigment that has since drifted, by someone who was working to a trend rather than to a bone structure. That is a different problem to bad work, and it usually has a better answer.

Wait before you do anything

The single most common mistake is acting in the first fortnight.

Fresh permanent makeup looks far darker, sharper and heavier than it will end up. It scabs, it flakes, it goes patchy, and there is usually a stage where one side looks like it has healed and the other has not. All of that is normal, and none of it tells you anything reliable about the final result.

Nobody, including the person who did it, can properly assess permanent makeup until it has healed. If you are inside that window, the honest advice is to leave it alone and stop looking at it in a magnifying mirror.

Once it has healed, you have a real result to judge, and it is very often better than the version you were panicking about.

What can usually be corrected without removal

Plenty. More than most people assume.

Colour that has gone warm

Old brow pigment very often fades towards orange or red. This is the single most common complaint and it is frequently correctable by working a cooler pigment over the top, which neutralises the warmth rather than covering it.

It is not guesswork, it is colour theory, and it is one of the things that separates an experienced artist from someone who has done a weekend course.

Colour that has gone grey or blue

Less common but it happens, particularly with older pigments and with black used where brown should have been. It can often be warmed back the same way, in the opposite direction.

A shape that is too thin, too short or slightly uneven

Adding to an existing shape is generally straightforward, because you are working outwards into untouched skin. If the existing brow sits within the shape you want, the old work effectively becomes the foundation for the new one.

Work that has simply faded

Not really a correction at all. Faded permanent makeup is often the easiest thing to work over, because there is little pigment left to fight.

What needs removal first

Removal becomes the answer when the problem is one of these.

The shape is too big or sits too high

This is the hard one. You cannot make a brow smaller by adding pigment. If the existing outline sits outside where the new one should be, the old outline has to come out, or you will always be able to see it under the new work.

The same applies to a wing on eyeliner that extends past where you now want it.

The pigment is very dense

Solid, saturated work leaves nowhere for new pigment to sit. Trying to correct heavy old work usually just makes it heavier.

It has been worked over several times already

Layer upon layer of correction is how brows end up dark, muddy and stubborn. At some point the answer stops being another layer.

What is best left alone

Sometimes the honest answer is to do nothing.

If the work is old, faded and heading in the right direction on its own, waiting another year can leave you with a much easier starting point and a better result than intervening now. Fading is free. Removal is not.

Any artist who tells you every situation needs immediate work is telling you about their diary, not your face.

Questions worth asking before you let anyone touch it

If you are booking a correction or a removal, these five questions will tell you most of what you need to know about who you are dealing with.

• Is this a correction or does it need removal first, and why?
• What is realistically achievable, and what is not?
• How many sessions do you expect this to take?
• What happens if it does not lift the way you are expecting?
• Can I see work you have corrected, rather than work you have done from scratch?

That last one matters most. Correcting somebody else's work is a genuinely different skill to doing your own from a blank face, and plenty of very good artists do not take it on.

The thing nobody says out loud

Fixing bad permanent makeup takes longer, costs more and is less predictable than having it done properly in the first place. Anyone who quotes you a single session and a single price for correcting somebody else's work, sight unseen, has not looked at it properly.

What you want is somebody who will look at a photograph, tell you honestly which of the four categories above you fall into, and be willing to say that the answer is to wait.