Spoiler: stop doing half the things you’re currently doing.
Let me tell you about my eyebrows in 2015. They were thin. Not intentionally thin, not in a cool editorial way — just genuinely sparse and sad because I had spent two years tweezing them into submission every time I spotted a stray hair. I thought I was being precise. I was being destructive. Some of those follicles have never recovered and I am thirty-something years old still filling in the same two patches every morning because of decisions I made with a pair of tweezers in bad bathroom lighting a decade ago.
I tell you this not for sympathy but because it’s the most useful thing I can share upfront: lashes and brows are hair, and hair does not come back reliably once you damage it enough. The whole game is protecting what you have. Not buying the right serum. Not finding the right mascara. Stopping the habits that are quietly wrecking things.
Once you stop those, then the serums and the castor oil and the rest of it actually have something to work with.
The Mascara Habits That Are Killing Your Lashes
Sleeping in mascara. I know you know. I know you’ve done it anyway because you were tired and the bed was right there and it seemed fine. It is not fine. Mascara dries your lashes stiff overnight and every time your face moves against the pillow those stiffened lashes snap. You wake up, there are lashes on your pillow, and you wonder why yours look thinner than they used to. That’s why. Remove your mascara every night. Every single one.
The removal is where most people also go wrong. Rubbing at your eyes with a dry cotton pad is aggressive enough to take lashes out with it. What you want to do instead: soak a cotton pad with micellar water or an oil-based remover, hold it against your closed eye for a full ten seconds without moving, then wipe downward. Not in circles. Not back and forth. Down. One direction, light pressure, done. It takes twenty seconds per eye. That’s the whole thing.
Waterproof mascara every single day. It’s such a good product and it causes so much damage. The formula that makes it survive swimming also makes it require significantly more force to remove than regular mascara. More force means more rubbing means more lash loss. Save waterproof for the occasions where you actually need it — events, beach days, the days when you know you’re going to cry. For regular Tuesday mornings, use a regular formula. Your lashes in six months will be noticeably better for it.
Curling after mascara. This one is fast: dried mascara acts like glue. Lashes stick to the curler pad. You open the curler and some of them come with it. Curl first, then mascara. Always. And while we’re here — replace the rubber pad on your curler. If you can’t remember the last time you did, it needs replacing. A flat old pad doesn’t curl well and increases the chance of pinching. New pad: four dollars. Worth it every time.
What Actually Helps Lashes Grow Back
Castor oil. I resisted this for years because it sounded like something a wellness influencer made up to sell a lifestyle. Then I tried it out of desperation after a particularly bad mascara-removal week and noticed a difference within a month. My lashes were thicker and less breakage-prone. I looked it up afterward. Castor oil is high in ricinoleic acid, which has genuine anti-inflammatory properties that support hair follicle health. It also coats the lash and reduces protein loss, meaning the lashes you have break less.
How to use it without ruining your night: clean spoolie or old mascara wand, a tiny amount of castor oil, apply to the roots of your lashes before bed. Tiny amount. If you put too much on it migrates into your eyes while you sleep and you wake up with blurred vision, which is alarming until you figure out what happened and then just annoying. Three to four nights a week, not every night. Give it six weeks before you decide if it’s working.
Lash serums with peptides are the next level up if castor oil isn’t enough. The ones worth buying contain peptides, biotin, and panthenol — they stimulate the follicle and extend the growth phase of the lash cycle. RevitaLash and RapidLash are the two with the most consistent real results across a lot of different people. Results take six to eight weeks of daily use. Not two weeks. Six to eight. If you stop using them your lashes gradually go back to where they were. They’re maintenance, not a cure.
One thing that gets missed entirely in lash conversations: if your lashes are thinning and you haven’t changed anything in your routine, get bloodwork done. Thinning lashes are sometimes the first visible sign of a thyroid issue or iron deficiency. No serum fixes that. A doctor does.
Eyebrows: The Honest Truth About Regrowth
Some of those hairs are gone. I need to say that clearly because a lot of content about brow regrowth implies that with the right product everything comes back. It doesn’t always. Repeated tweezing from the same follicle eventually damages it permanently. If you’ve been tweezing the same patch for ten years and nothing grows there, that follicle is probably done.
What you can do: give the area six full months of complete rest. No tweezing, no threading, no waxing anywhere near it. Brow hairs that have been dormant for years sometimes do come back — just slowly, and only if you stop disturbing the area entirely. Six months feels like a long time. It is a long time. But it’s the only way to find out what’s actually recoverable versus what’s gone for good.
During those six months, use a brow serum. Vegamour GRO Brow Serum and GrandeBROW are the two I’d point people toward — both have peptide formulas that encourage existing follicles and wake up dormant ones. Apply with the spoolie to dry skin every night. Consistent use, same as with lash serums, same timeline: six to eight weeks before you see anything meaningful.
Castor oil works on brows too, same application, same frequency. One warning specific to brows that doesn’t apply the same way to lashes: castor oil sitting on the skin under your brows can clog pores and cause small breakouts along the brow line. Apply to the hairs, not the skin. It’s a subtle difference in technique but it matters.
Shaping Without Destroying Them All Over Again
The most common mistake I see right now isn’t over-tweezing anymore — it’s over-filling. People learned to draw in brows when theirs were sparse, got good at it, and never adjusted as their brows filled back in. The result is a very precise, very symmetrical, very obviously drawn-on brow sitting on top of actual brow hairs that are doing fine on their own. It looks like a lot.
The goal is to work with what you have, not replace it. If your brows have grown in reasonably well, a tinted brow gel or a fine pencil used in short feathery strokes to fill the gaps is genuinely enough. You don’t need to draw the whole shape. You need to fill the holes.
For shaping: threading over waxing if you can access it. Threading removes only the hair without touching the surrounding skin. Waxing repeatedly in the same area over years pulls at the skin, thins it, and can damage follicles the same way over-tweezing does. Every four to six weeks, only the clearly out-of-place hairs removed, is the least damaging way to maintain shape while growing in.
Home tweezing: only in natural light. Only the hairs that are obviously wrong. Stop earlier than feels right. There is a specific thing that happens when you’re tweezing where you get into a momentum and the mirror gets closer and you keep finding one more hair that needs to go. That momentum is lying to you. Put the tweezers down when you think you’re about eighty percent done. Check again the next day in different light. You’ll almost always find you were actually finished.
The Routine — Morning, Evening, Done
Morning takes about two minutes if you’re doing it right. Brush your brows upward with a clean spoolie — this alone makes an enormous difference to how natural and groomed they look without any product. Add a clear or tinted brow gel if you want hold and a little extra thickness. Then do your eye makeup. Curl lashes before mascara. Always before.
Evening: remove everything gently. Soak, hold, wipe downward. If you’re using a lash serum, apply it to clean dry lashes at the root immediately after. Brow serum or castor oil goes on next, to the hairs. The whole thing is ninety seconds once it’s a habit. The habit is the hardest part.
Weekly: clean your spoolie. Product and skin cells build up on it and you’re reapplying that every morning directly to your brows. Clean the rubber pad on your lash curler with micellar water. Check if the pad needs replacing.
That’s it. Nothing complicated, nothing that costs a lot of money, nothing that requires rearranging your whole routine. The improvements — fuller brows, more lashes, less daily breakage — come from removing the bad habits first and then being consistent with the simple ones. The castor oil and the serums do their part but they can’t undo damage that keeps happening. Stop the damage. Then let the good stuff work. Six to eight weeks and you’ll see it.
And please, for the love of everything, stop tweezing in bad lighting.