Improve your microblading: How to achieve crisp strokes.

Improve your microblading: How to achieve crisp strokes.

Let me ask you something:

• Do you struggle with your brow work turning blurry?
• Do you seem to get endlessly patchy results?
• Do your strokes never seem to disappear at all?

If you answered yes to any of these above questions then don’t get discouraged because this post is for you. 

Microblading can feel like one of the hardest procedures to learn, and as you likely already know, it takes quite a bit of practice to achieve the desired look. 

The following two factors will greatly influence your results:

A. Your client’s skin condition.

B. Your choice of technique, skills, and microblading patterns.

Let’s discuss these in more detail so that you can have a well-rounded understanding of their effects on your microblading goals starting with the first one.

A: Your client’s skin condition.

No matter how excellent your skills are if your client has problematic skin it’s difficult to expect great results.

I personally don’t perform microblading on every skin type and I always try to explain to my clients with a skin condition that it could result in undesirable soft-blurred strokes and that might not meet their ideal expectations. Sure it would still look natural, but it wouldn’t be as ideally crisp as it should be.

You should only move forward with the procedure if after you’ve explained these points thoroughly they still express a desire to continue. 

The following are some of the common skin conditions that can affect your microblading results: 

1. Being overweight.
Often people with overweight body types can experience an oilier skin consistency. If they’re lucky they might receive a powdered brow look but worst case scenario it can possibly heal into a terribly patchy smudged look. You can definitely still provide microblading for such clients, but make sure you choose a more suitable microblading pattern that I will discuss later on in this post.

2. Having big pores.
When working with this skin type it will be very hard to make microblading stay on the skin. Most of your efforts will be lost on this kind of skin during the healing process and it might require several touch-ups furthermore resulting in the strokes will not be as crisp as ideally desired.

3. Previously tattooed brows.
Another difficult skin type worth mentioning is any that’s been previously tattooed with ink that hasn’t faded completely. Even though the strokes might have healed crisply they’ll likely become almost invisible and unable to cover the previous tattoo. In this case, I usually perform machine strokes as they heal nicely in almost any case. For more information about microblading versus machine hair strokes click here.

4. Highly vascular skin.
This skin type often requires several touch-ups because due to the nature of the skin it can be very hard to inject the ink without excessive bleeding. In some of these cases, it is best not to perform microblading at all.

5. Previous skin treatments.
Clients that came to you after skin treatments, facials, sunburns, will have similar results to those with high vascular skin. Microblading in this scenario is not recommended.

B: Your choice of technique, skills and microblading patterns.

• • 3 Finger stretch.
    Your client’s skin is your canvas and you need to work with it stretched tightly. This is a very important condition which many of you might ignore but keep in mind that the more you stretch the skin tightly into the direction of your planned stroke, the crisper it would be after healing.

• • Strokes should not overlap.
    If the front of the brow looks clean and is healing nicely but the middle and tail of the brows appear patchy then this is an indicator that you must work on your stroke placement. As with the front, middle and tail parts of the brow, strokes should have their own position and place. I recommend carefully planning the middle brow strokes and practice a hundred times if needed. There should be no sense of improvising the results for your client in these areas and practice makes perfect.

• • Equal distance between strokes.
    Each and every stroke that I place on my client’s brows is with a precise distance between them. If you need some guiding assistance when doing this you can put dots around the shape to assist you with guiding the distance by eye. 

• • Clean pattern.
    It’s important to always make certain that the middle strokes are as clean as the front. There should be no overlapping and no overstuffing the area with strokes.

• • Fewer strokes better healing.
    The less the number of strokes you need to make the less damage you make to the skin and therefore the better healed the result. Don’t try to stuff an empty spot with a bunch of random strokes. Instead, it is better to fill it out on your touch-up to avoid the neighbour strokes being messed up. Otherwise, you can get a patchy and blurry look, or sometimes even scarring. When it comes to people with problematic skin conditions I prefer a simpler microblading pattern with just a bunch of semi-curved parallel lines.

• • Make sure to place ink on the skin first.
    You should make sure your blade has ink on the tip before you slide. You want to make sure you get your ink inside the micro-cut so typically I would first slightly tap on the skin to place the ink first and then slide through the skin.

• • Quality of ink.
    The quality of your ink is very crucial and it does improve your results drastically. Although I usually try not to sponsor outside brands I must say that the Phibrows ink is by far my favorite for microblading. 

• • Quality of blades, thin and thick.
    As you could imagine, thinner blades tend to create less damage to the skin which leads to a much crisper outcome. What more can I say? It’s as simple as that. I suggest trying NanoFlow Microblades which is thin and creates crisp healed-results. Get it here https://www.beautyslesh.com/product/nanoflow-needles/.

• • Fewer paths mean better healing.
    Microblading strokes were not meant to look thick, intense or vivid so it’s not recommended that you aim to achieve this by doing too many paths because by doing so this will scar the skin. Clients who like dark, “stand out” brows should choose powder brows, add shading to microblading, or have strokes done by machine. Stay away from any temptation to try to achieve a heavy brow look with just microblading as you’ll cause too much damage to the skin and I don’t recommend it at all. 

The Secret Path

I’m going to share my secret here and that is to inject the ink one more time right after you’ve placed it. Right after you finish one side of the brow you can inject ink one more time (very carefully) throughout the pattern before finally moving to the other brow. Let’s consider what happens when you move to the other side, your skin will naturally react and start to lock in the ink so it makes no sense to reopen it again and again and thus damage it.

When doing this you should place the ink with caution over the exact same stroke being careful not to go over the boundaries. Otherwise healed strokes will come out thicker and blurrier. After the second (or at most the third) path of ink injection, you should stop and if the stroke is not dark enough you should explain to the client that you’ll be leaving it for their touch up. 

Your pattern for each skin type

For good, tight-conditioned skin, I prefer to use a more complicated pattern:

For oily, problematic skin, I prefer to use a simpler, parallel lines pattern:

Pressure and depth 

It’s important for new students to pay careful attention to the depth of their work as it is common that they might tend to go too deep in the beginning. It should only be as deep as you would do if you were microblading without numbing cream; as shallow as possible! Remember, you can always add missing strokes on the touch-up but you can never color correct deeply scarred blue strokes. You can practice on fruits and bananas, just slightly scratching the upper layers.

Want to learn more? Check out my videos on Youtube.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]