Anastasia Soare can do eyebrows anywhere. ‘Ten years ago I was on a plane from Europe to New York,’ she says. ‘The woman next to me said: “Oh my god, you’re Anastasia! I couldn’t get an appointment at your salon. I’m going to a wedding when I land. Will you do my brows?” I always have tweezers on me so I said, “Sure, why not, let’s go to the bathroom.”’ She had to pause when they hit turbulence, but the final result looked perfect.
Soare – it’s pronounced soirée – knows about brows. The 67-year-old make-up mogul has waxed, plucked and filled in the eyebrows of Jennifer Aniston, Jennifer Lopez, Naomi Campbell, Michelle Pfeiffer, Victoria Beckham, Sharon Stone, Hailey Bieber, Justin Bieber, all the Kardashians, Oprah Winfrey, Michelle Obama, and lots and lots of others.
In 1997, she also started the cosmetics company Anastasia Beverly Hills, which has 18.4 million Instagram followers, was valued at $3 billion (£2.25 billion) by 2018 after an investment from a private equity firm, and is now, says Forbes, worth $400 million (£300 million) – this year, the same magazine listed Soare as the 47th richest self-made woman in America. Her brand sells, among other things, a £23 eyebrow pencil with 16,000 reviews on Sephora – most of them five-star. And now, Soare has just published her first memoir: Raising Brows.
She’s speaking on Zoom from Paris, where she’s attending Fashion Week. Her hair is ‘bottle blonde’ but her eyebrows are naturally dark, ‘overtweezed from the 80s, and thinning at the ends’. She has filled them with her ‘micro brow pen’ and set them with her ‘freeze wax’. How long did that take? ‘Like, two minutes.’ When did she last leave the house bare-browed? ‘I don’t. Even on Sundays, when I try not to wear any make-up, I do my eyebrows.’ (Soare, who is 5ft 4in, wears heels every day except Sundays, too.)
Soare at a Sephora event in Milan, 2019
What actually is ‘doing’ one’s eyebrows? To Soare, it means getting them into a ‘good shape’ (waxing then plucking) then filling them into a ‘perfect shape’ with a pencil. To achieve the ‘perfect shape’, you trace around each brow with a pencil a shade lighter than usual, then fill them in with a pencil that is as close to your natural colour as possible.
For tracing, Soare says the eyebrows should start directly above the inside edge of each nostril. The highest point of the arch in the brow should align, diagonally, with the tip of your nose. Then the end of each eyebrow should align diagonally, with the edge of your nostrils. If that sounds highly complicated, her website has diagrams.
Soare lives in Beverly Hills, but was born in communist Romania. She moved to California as an asylum seeker in 1989, aged 32, with her husband Victor and their one-year-old daughter Claudia. Victor – who’d been in the navy – took a job as a taxi driver and Soare got a job in a salon. She studied art and engineering in Bucharest but, anticipating she’d need a job that didn’t require much English, retrained as a beautician.
In Romania, beauticians shaped their clients’ eyebrows – but in America the practice was unfamiliar. So, Soare started doing it to her LA clients for free before their facials. She didn’t have product to fill brows in after plucking, so she used a homemade mixture of Vaseline and dark eyeshadow.
This being LA, Soare soon established a starry clientele. In her book she remembers ‘the most beautiful woman I had ever seen’ wandering into the salon. Soare did her brows and gave her a facial. Later, Soare’s colleagues informed her it was Cindy Crawford. By 1992, she had $5,000 in savings and decided to rent her own salon space – for $1,000 a month – and focus on eyebrows. It was a risky idea regardless, but that year Soare had also separated from her husband, and he had moved back to Romania. She remained in the US with Claudia, becoming a single mother.
Thankfully, plenty of her clients followed her and Soare became a word-of-mouth success. In 1999, Oprah invited her to do her brows on live television; the TV presenter said the results took ‘ten years off her face’. Afterwards, Soare’s phone rang constantly for six months.
In the late 1990s, nobody really owned eyebrow pencils; Soare’s clients would have their brows filled in at the salon then wash them off that night at home. So, in 1997, she went to a make-up trade show in Italy and found manufacturers and suppliers to make her first products – an eyebrow pencil with a brush at one end. Soare was the first to sell something like it, but didn’t think to patent it. Does that annoy her? ‘Not really.’
No surprise. Patent or not, Soare sold a lot of eyebrow pencils – then a lot of mascaras, lipsticks, contour kits. Last month, an interviewer asked how old Soare was when she became a millionaire. She replied: ‘I’m not a millionaire. No, I’m a billionaire.’ (In appropriately billionaire behaviour, Soare has a Picasso lithograph above her office desk. The subject, she says, has terrible eyebrows.)
Soare with Victoria and Harper Beckham, 2024
Still, when I ask when she stopped worrying about money, she says she hasn’t. ‘I still work like I can’t pay my rent next month.’ This attitude is apparent even over Zoom. Soare is a dogged – but funny – self-promoter.
The question who has the best eyebrows in Hollywood, gets the answer: ‘All of my clients!’ When pressed, she settles on JLo. Or Oprah. Or Hailey Bieber.
She’s also ruthless. I ask if it’s true she sacked her daughter as her salon receptionist because she once turned up late. ‘Yes, of course,’ she says, rather breezily. ‘She had to learn!’ (Months later, after the child had begged, Soare rehired her. Claudia is now the brand’s creative director and hasn’t been late for anything since.)
Today, Soare oversees the cosmetics company and does the eyebrows of long-standing clients. (She goes to Lopez’s house every month or so, to pluck and chat. ‘We are friends. It’s an amazing job.’) I’d read she once drove, at midnight, to a client who needed last-minute brows. ‘I don’t remember the exact time, but sure, in my career I’ve done lots of that,’ she says. ‘I am in the service business. And if you need your eyebrows done I will do your eyebrows.’ Even on an aeroplane.
ANASTASIA ON…
Tweezers Pointy tweezers are not for brows; eyebrow tweezers should always be slanted. It’s because our brow bone is curved.
Brow transplants They’re possible, but the hair they take for the transplant comes from the back of your head – so it’s going to grow long, and you have to trim it. I’d only, maybe, explore it if someone didn’t have any eyebrow hair. But they need to know what to expect!
Threading It’s not my skill. But, waxing or threading, it doesn’t matter what you use to remove hair – what is important is which hairs you remove.
Overplucking The most damaging thing you can do is to over-tweeze or wax your eyebrows. The follicles on your brows are more sensitive than on your head – so, sometimes, they just don’t grow back. I wax and pluck maybe once a month.
Eyebrows after menopause Often, older women lose the ends of their eyebrows – they become very thin. I’d stick with product and fill in the ends.
Laminated eyebrows It’s not for me. Lamination pushes your eyebrow hairs so they stand up straight. But a normal, beautiful eyebrow has hair that curves to one side.
Tattooed eyebrows and microblading I’m not a big fan of either. They look good for a month and then the colour changes. When you have them redone, you need to get a darker shade. Eventually, you’ll end up with very deep, dark eyebrows.
Bleached eyebrows Gen Zers have started bleaching their eyebrows; it doesn’t bother me. As long as it doesn’t remove the eyebrow hair, you can always colour them back.
Raising Brows is published by Blink, £20. To order a copy for £17 until 9 November, go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937. Free UK delivery on orders over £25.
