Ombré Shading: How to Get Beautiful Gradient Effect For the Eyebrows
Ombré shading has become a trend and more and more clients have been asking for this coveted eyebrow effect. Who can resist having gorgeous eyebrows 24/7 anyway? With ombré brows, there’s no more filling in your brows before work every day or worrying about how they would look like whenever you go swimming.
Depending on what your clients want, you can create either natural-looking brows or the full eyebrow make-up look with ombré shading. It’s such a versatile technique, but it is less intricate than doing hair strokes when microblading. To get the ombré effect, you have to blend the shades properly to achieve a beautiful fade from light to dark. Keep reading to find out you can do just that.
Creating Soft Transitions and Seamless Gradient for Ombre Shading
1. Draw a crisp outline. You should map the brow really nicely to achieve a crisp outline. To make it easier for you, the outline should be sharper than when doing microblading.
2. Shade the outline gently from the tip to the head of the brow. Always remember that pressure has to be lighter as you go towards the head to make a lighter front. The top line of the front of the brows should look very light, so apply very gentle pressure. If the outline on the front of the brows is dark, it will be hard to achieve a natural look once you start shading. Wipe just a small section of the shaded outline to see if there’s any ink left, if there’s none left, increase the pressure.
3. Start filling in the tip of the tail of the brows up to the arch. This should be the darkest section of the brows. When shading, start from the top part of the brow, shade your way to the bottom, and then back up again. Make sure the hand movements are consistent throughout so the results are even. Keep the pressure light to achieve good retention and avoid scarring.
4. The secret to a beautifully blended ombre effect is your hand movements! Since you want a darker effect in the tail, your strides should be more controlled and your back and forth hand movements narrower. This allows the shading machine to create more pin-point dots on the tail of the brows to achieve a darker look. Hand movements for the head of the brows should be wide enough for the dots to be far apart from each other.
Work on a small section of the tail first and wipe the pigment once you finish working on that specific section. This will let you evaluate your work and make any needed adjustments if there are any gaps or missed areas. Only then should you move on to the next part of the brow.
5. Continue on to the middle part of the brows, with wider back and forth movements of the hand compared to when shading the tail and the arch.
6. Again wipe the pigment after working on a small section to ensure the shades are blended well and you did not miss any areas.
7. Once you reach the front of the brow, apply extremely light pressure and much wider hand movements. You should simply be brushing the machine on the skin to achieve dots that are much farther apart from each other.
8. With wider strides, blend your way back in towards the middle part of the brow for a seamless looking gradient effect.
9. Speed I use – A lot of people ask me what the machine speed setting should be when shading. There’s no one answer to this as different machines have different speed settings. What I can say is play with the settings until you achieve similar dot effects in the photo above when you make wide back and forth strides. I wrote a more detailed post about it here.
10. The machine I use – I use the Bella Dragon Machine which is really best for shading. Check it out here https://www.beautyslesh.com/product/bella-dragon-pmu-machine/
11. Color I use – I use Tina Davies pigments for shading. You can the pigments using this link http://bit.ly/32xhDNm to get a 15% discount on your purchase.
I’m launching an Ombré Shading course at BeautySlesh Academy soon! I’ll teach you everything you have to know to create consistently beautiful and elegant ombré shaded eyebrows that your clients will love. I’ll even share my exclusive ombré shading techniques that got me more clients. If you’re ready to invest in yourself so you can offer ombré shading to your clients, you can pre-register here.
Heads up! This post contains affiliate links and I will earn a small commission for any purchase you make at no extra cost to you. This will help me provide you with more free and helpful microblading content in the future! Don’t worry as I will never recommend anything on Beauty Slesh that I don’t personally believe in and won’t be beneficial to our microblading career.
