For over thirty years Anastasia Soare has been the world’s foremost authority on brow power. But her newest creation, ArchiBrow, might just be her most democratic act of beauty yet. This week her brand, Anastasia Beverly Hills, is launching its ArchiBrow Pencil collection at Sephora across the Middle East. It’s Soare’s answer to the microblade brow movement that has been sweeping the beauty industry.
The Romanian-born entrepreneur opened her Beverly Hills brow salon in 1997. Since then she has spent decades convincing the world that an eyebrow is not a footnote but the foundation of any face and she is widely credited as being the match that lit the flame on the global brow industry that is now worth billions. The celebrities who have sat in her chair — Jennifer Lopez since 1992, Oprah, Victoria Beckham, Kim Kardashian, Naomi Campbell, Michelle Obama — read like a gilded address book of modern fame. But what currently excites her is how ArchiBrow is going to make crafting the perfect brow possible for even the most inexperienced novice.
The product is deceptively simple in concept: a brow pencil with a 1⁄2mm ultra-thin blade-like tip designed to mimic the precise, hair-like strokes of professional microblading — no appointment, no needles, no commitment, no ink that bleeds into your skincare routine six months later. Just a twist, a touch, and what Soare describes as the easiest great brow anyone has ever been able to give themselves.
Here Soare discusses the unique allure of the ArchiBrow, the sacred geometry of brow proportions, and what she would tell the women of the Middle East — whose brows, she insists, are among the most magnificent in the world — if she had just one piece of advice.
ArchiBrow lands in the Middle East this week. What makes this brow pencil different from everything else in the Anastasia Beverly Hills arsenal?
Okay, so first — this is important — when you use a Brow Wiz or a Brow Definer, you are working with a formula that is heavier on wax and emollient. This one is almost entirely pigment. The moment you touch this pencil to your skin, with almost no pressure, you are creating something that looks like a hair. A real hair. A stroke. The tip is like a blade — literally, it is half a millimetre, and if you twist it out more than that, it will snap, that is how fine it is. And then on the other side you have a spoolie, and you brush, and it blends into something completely natural. I love Brow Wiz. I love Brow Definer. But this is different. This is for everyone — the makeup artist, the woman who barely knows how to hold a pencil. Anyone. And that is what excites me the most: it is so easy to use.
The precision seems to be the real revelation. What is the difference between ArchiBrow and classic microblading?
The thing about microblading that nobody wants to say out loud: the minute you start using serums — which every woman should be doing — it changes. It bleeds. Those beautiful hair-like strokes you paid a great deal of money for start to blur. Much faster than a twenty-year-old tattoo. It becomes a blob.
You’ve spoken about the technique of using two shades — one lighter for the base shape, one closer to the natural hair colour for the individual strokes. Can you walk me through the thinking?
Think about a full, natural eyebrow. When light hits it, the hairs cast a shadow on the skin beneath — and that shadow is what gives the brow its depth, its dimension, its body. So you use one shade lighter than your actual hair colour to create that shadow, to lay in the shape. And then you use your true shade — or even one shade deeper — to draw the individual hair strokes on top. The two-colour approach is simply replicating what nature already does.
Let’s talk about brows across a lifetime. You mentioned that the right approach changes with age — that the mature brow requires a fundamentally different technique.
As we age, the brow bone loses volume and fat, and gravity does exactly what gravity does — it pulls everything down. The tail of the eyebrow drops. The whole brow can begin to close the eye, to make it look heavy and small. So for a woman who is more mature: shorten the brow slightly at the tail, and lift it. A youthful face is always characterised by the brow sitting higher, opening the eye. You can recreate that.
Your Golden Ratio method underpins everything you do. For someone encountering it for the first time, give me the condensed version.
Three marks. That is all it takes to begin. Above the middle of the inner nostril — that is where the brow starts. From the outer corner of the nose to the outer corner of the eye — that is where the brow ends. From the tip of the nose through the centre of the iris — that is the peak, the arch. Once you have those three points, you understand the architecture of the face. The human eye is hardwired to recognise balance and proportion — it sees harmony before the brain can name it.
The Middle East. You’ve been here, you know this market. The brow culture in this region is, to put it mildly, serious. What do you make of how women here relate to their brows compared to elsewhere in the world?
Women in the Middle East are genuinely blessed. They have thick, naturally gorgeous brows — some of the most beautiful I have seen anywhere in the world. And this is precisely why it pains me when I see the pressure many of them feel to over-tweeze, or to tattoo, or to go very straight and very boxy, which was fashionable here for a while. When you take a beautiful, full brow and make it perfectly horizontal and blunt, you disturb the proportion of the face. For the women of this region, who already have the most extraordinary raw material — please. Leave the fullness.
How did you convince people in the early days that the eyebrow mattered at all? In the early nineties, when pencil-thin and rounded was everywhere, how did you make the case?
Slowly. And for free, at first. I was doing facials, and I began shaping my clients’ brows without even charging for it, because the idea that an eyebrow was a transformative service simply didn’t exist yet. But then my clients would leave the salon and get compliments. People would stop them on the street. Makeup artists on photo shoots would call me because once the brow was right, the eyeshadow sat differently, the eye looked lifted, everything came into balance. And gradually it became undeniable. It took nearly ten years before I launched my product line. Ten years of proving it one face at a time.
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