I was a late bloomer when it came to makeup. Most of the women in my family keep their faces bare, so that’s what I was used to—though you’d think growing up during the peak of the 2010s makeup boom, with its cut creases, baking, and sculpted brows, might’ve changed that. But I stayed on the sidelines. I knew I was nowhere near prepared to step into that arena. At least, until my sophomore year of high school, when my best friend pointed out something I’d never noticed before.

She asked me if I knew there was a slit running through my right eyebrow. I hadn’t noticed it before, but the second I looked in the mirror, it was all I could see: a tiny gap in the hair glaring back at me. Newly tuned in to every brow I encountered, I realized my mom and sister had the same hairless sliver in their brows. The difference? My hair is much finer, so the gap looked even more pronounced. My hypercritical brain took this imperfection and ran with it. I went into overdrive trying to achieve the perfect brows.

I started by getting my brows waxed to clean up the shape. Soon after, I found myself at Ulta, clutching the brow product of all brow products: Anastasia Beverly Hills Brow Wiz. At first, I kept it simple, just filling in the gaps with light strokes through the midsection. I stuck to that for about a year. But as I got more comfortable, I started following along with YouTube tutorials. I wasn’t doing full-coverage foundation or rocking liquid matte lipsticks just yet, but my brow routine got a full overhaul.

I wanted to shape, define, and perfect like all my favorite YouTubers—think Desi Perkins, Jackie Aina, Alissa Ashley, and Jaclyn Hill at their peak. Pamela Becher, a brow artist based in Miami, points to Kylie Jenner as the celebrity who started it all: “Her sharply-defined, perfectly filled-in brows became an Instagram beauty standard in 2016,” says Becher.

So with that, I graduated from shyly filling in my brows with a pencil to fully carving them out using Anastasia Beverly Hills Dipbrow Pomade, a tiny pot of highly-pigmented brow makeup. I’d load up an angled brush with creamy pigment and trace it over my sparse brows, exaggerating the arch and dragging out the tail until it nearly met my eyeliner wing—perfectly on-trend for the boxy, angular brow shape of the time. Then came my favorite step: concealer cleanup. With a few swipes under the brow bone and over the arch, I could fake the look of a fresh wax, even when I was weeks overdue.