Black, Charcoal or Brown: Choosing a Brow Pencil for Black Hair

Neither answer follows from your hair colour alone, because a brow is read as a contrast against the skin beside it, and that is where the published measurements are taken. That is a different question from the one the shelf asks, and it changes what the choice is about. What follows is what these pencils contain, what the measurements actually found, and where this range runs short. It does not name a shade for deep skin, and the last slide says why.

Black hair is a label, not a measurement

The question assumes black and dark brown are two categories. A 2023 review in the International Journal of Cosmetic Science appraises how human hair is classified and finds the usual grouping into African, Asian and Caucasian hair too blunt to carry the worldwide diversity in curl, shape, size and colour. Colour is one of the things it says that grouping fails to hold. On pigment it reports eumelanin as the relatively abundant type in every hair colour except red, which carries a high pheomelanin content. That puts black and dark brown in the same pigment class. The review does not measure how much separates them, which is itself the point, because nothing in the label tells you. Its own recommendation is that comparative studies report the fibre's measured characteristics, its colour among them. If a label is too blunt for a laboratory, it is too blunt to settle a pencil.

What the eye is actually reading

Two lines of work make the brow measurable. In 2003, researchers at MIT tested how well people recognised familiar faces with the eyebrows absent. Taking the eyebrows away disrupted recognition more than taking the eyes away, which places the brow among the most load-bearing marks on a face. The second line says what that mark is read against. Facial contrast is the colour and luminance difference between a facial feature and the surrounding skin. A 2013 study found that aspects of it decrease with age in Caucasian women. A 2017 study measured it for the eyes, the lips and the brows in photographs of Chinese, Latin American and black South African women, and most aspects that fall with age in Caucasian women were found to fall in those groups too. Contrast is a relationship between two surfaces, never a property of one. The same pigment laid on two faces is two different amounts of it.

What is in the pencil, by the label

Every pencil in this range shares one wax core and one colour list. The page gives beeswax with microcrystalline, paraffin and synthetic waxes over a hydrogenated palm kernel oil base, which holds a firm tip on a twist-up barrel that needs no sharpening. Two effect materials sit in the fixed part of that list rather than the variable one. Bismuth oxychloride and mica are in every barrel, and both are there for pearl and light rather than for colour. Under may contain, the page names black iron oxide, red iron oxide, titanium dioxide, Red 7 Lake and Yellow 5 Lake. Read that list correctly. A may contain list names the palette a whole range is mixed from, not the recipe inside one barrel. Two of those five are the dark oxide and the red. The third is white, and white is the lever that lifts a shade lighter.

How much lands on hair, and how much on skin

One stroke does two jobs. Where the tip meets a hair it colours a fibre. Where it meets skin between hairs it draws a mark, and a mark behaves like the contrast in the slide before this one. How often each happens depends on the brow in front of you. A 2019 photographic survey in the same journal measured six eyebrow parameters across six ethnic groups: length, waviness, oblique aspect, height, total surface and hair coverage. Most varied by group, and total brow surface ranged by about four times. Hair coverage varied widely, lowest among the African women surveyed and highest among the Indian women. Those are group averages, taken under the same blunt groupings the hair review objected to, and they describe nobody's actual brow. The Clear Eyebrow Gel sidesteps the question, since its page lists a fast-drying film and no colourant at all.

What the range holds, and where it runs short

Five pencils. Three of them carry no shade word in the title, which is the practical problem a shopper hits, so what follows is each page's own description. The black is a deep, soft black, the charcoal a deep charcoal brown, the brown a natural warm brown, and the last two a soft ash brown and a warm, soft taupe. Count the deep end and it holds two. Three sit lighter, two of them are called warm, and the single ash option is called soft rather than deep. There is no deep ash here, and nothing neutral between the charcoal and the warm brown. We are not naming one of these as the shade for deep skin. Contrast is read against the skin beside it, and these five have not been photographed on deep skin under one fixed light.

References

1. Sadr J, Jarudi I, Sinha P. The role of eyebrows in face recognition. Perception. 2003, volume 32, issue 3, pages 285-293. PMID 12729380. doi.org/10.1068/p5027
2. Porcheron A, Mauger E, Russell R. Aspects of facial contrast decrease with age and are cues for age perception. PLoS One. 2013, volume 8, issue 3, page e57985. PMID 23483959. doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0057985
3. Porcheron A, Mauger E, Soppelsa F, Liu Y, Ge L, Pascalis O, Russell R, Morizot F. Facial Contrast Is a Cross-Cultural Cue for Perceiving Age. Front Psychol. 2017, volume 8, page 1208. PMID 28790941. doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01208
4. Flament F, Seyrek I, Francois G, Zhu T, Ye C, Saint-Leger D. Morphometric characteristics of feminine eyebrows: variations with ethnicities and age. Int J Cosmet Sci. 2019, volume 41, issue 5, pages 443-449. PMID 31310328. doi.org/10.1111/ics.12557
5. Daniels G, Fraser A, Westgate GE. How different is human hair? A critical appraisal of the reported differences in global hair fibre characteristics and properties towards defining a more relevant framework for hair type classification. Int J Cosmet Sci. 2023, volume 45, issue 1, pages 50-61. PMID 36374002. doi.org/10.1111/ics.12819