Review: Hourglass Arch Brow Sculpting Pencil in Dark Brunette

I haven’t done many before & after photos on here yet (I’ll remedy that soon!), but if you’ve checked out my review of Hourglass Immaculate, you might have noticed that my eyebrows don’t exactly exist. They’re thin, sparse, and barely have any hairs at all toward the inner corners. Let this be a lesson to you – don’t overpluck your eyebrows, and definitely don’t do it consistently for 10+ years. You’ll regret it when they refuse to grow back.

The answer to this problem, of course, is to fake it with brow products. I’ve got a few favorites, but today I wanted to review something I’ve been trying out recently: the Hourglass Arch Brow Sculpting Pencil, which I have in the color Dark Brunette.

Packaging

The Hourglass pencil comes in a nice, wide body – about the thickness of a fine-point Sharpie. The larger tube is really comfortable to hold. The casing is made of a light metal (maybe aluminum?), so it feels sturdy but isn’t especially heavy. My only small complaint about it is that it’s exceptionally long – 6 1/8″. That’s a good half inch longer than the Anastasia Brow Wiz, and a full inch longer than Rimmel eyeliners. That’s not an issue if you store your pencils in a cup, but I store mine flat in drawers. The Hourglass Arch is just barely too long to fit the internal length of my InterDesign drawers. It can also be a tiny bit of a pain since I’m a glasses-wearer and usually get right up on the mirror to do my makeup.

Product

I really like the brush on the end of the pencil – it’s wide, short, and the bristles are really soft and flexible. It never feels scratchy, and doesn’t take off my foundation. The most important part, of course, is the pencil end. It has a wide, triangular tip that’s wonderful for softly filling in sparse brows.

Unfortunately, that shape also makes it fairly difficult to get really precise lines. For that reason, I’d recommend this pencil more for people who just want to fill in their existing brow shape rather than create a totally new one. For basic filling, the effect is really soft and natural-looking. The color transfers really easily onto the skin, and can be built up for more color depth. It does fade a bit on my oily skin, but using a primer under it (I use my NARS eye primer) helps a lot.

Color

The Hourglass Arch pencil comes in three colors – Blonde (light neutral taupe), Soft Brunette (medium brown) and Dark Brunette (dark brown). I definitely need to build the color up quite a bit to match the darkness of my natural hair color. Dark Brunette also has a slight reddish undertone – a little too much for my preference. In some lights it looks fine, but in others you can definitely see that it’s more red than my hair. In the photo below, you can see that it’s definitely warmer than the Anastasia Brow Wiz in Ebony, which is my everyday brow pencil.

Left: Hourglass Arch Brow Sculpting Pencil Dark Brunette
Right: Anastasia Brow Wiz Ebony

In Short: This is a fantastic product, but due to the limited colors and lack of precision, it doesn’t quite meet my personal needs.

The Hourglass Arch Brow Sculpting Pencil is available for $32 at spacenk.com, sephora.com, Sephora stores and hourglasscosmetics.com

(Please pardon the weird facial expression)