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Well-shaped brows can make your eyes look bigger and brighter, add lift to drooping eyelids, bring symmetry to irregular features, make undereye circles less noticeable, even minimize a wide nose. Once you’ve achieved flawless arches, you’ll need less make-up. Your hair color will suddenly appear to have more zing. You’ll look more alive, sexier, even more decisive.

“The eyes are the focus of the face, the windows to the soul,” says Robert Bolaños, Los Angeles-based makeup artist and brow-shaper to the stars, “and the right brows can bring out their sensuality and power.” Bolaños is passionate about eyebrows.  Working out of Gavert Atelier salon in Beverly Hills, and using a combination of waxing and tweezing, he sculpts from 25 to 30 pairs of brows a day, including those of Sarah Michelle Gellar and Virginia Madsen.

Bolaños believes that eyebrows should reflect a woman’s lifestyle. For instance, if he learns a client has just received a big promotion, he might suggest a stronger, more defined “power” brow. Brows should also complement a woman’s bone structure and the proportion of her features. “The goal is to make your face look as heart-shaped as possible,” Bolaños says, “whatever its natural shape.” This means a slightly more rounded brow if your face is angular, a straighter brow if your face is long (straight lines will create the illusion of a shorter face), thicker brows if you have a prominent forehead or a rounder face.

Eyebrows should always be as natural looking as possible, following the structure of the brow bone, with a nearly straight line graduating into a subtle arch. Too much fiddling and your brows will morph into what Bolaños has dubbed “Nike Swooshes” (overly curved with no straight line) or “McDonald’s arches” (too round without a defined arch).

No brows, he believes, are beyond rehabilitation. However, he cautions, “Don’t expect instant gratification. It takes patience to get perfect brows, especially if they’ve been overtweezed. I always tell my first-time clients, ‘We’re going to shape your brows today, and then you’re going to have to let them grow. In the meantime, we’ll use color to fill them in.’” Still, what’s amazing about even a first-time grooming is how a bit of deft waxing and tweezing can make sparse brows look thicker—“it’s because you’re adding definition,” Bolaños explains—while professional precision trimming will instantly tame bushy, coarse or curly brows.

Eyebrow shaping is a specialty; not something you necessarily want to entrust to your bikini waxer. After all, a few hairs short of a Brazilian is hardly a calamity; not so when you’re trying to resuscitate overplucked brows. Instead, get a referral from someone whose brows you admire.

Method — waxing versus tweezing — matters far less than skill, although eyebrow groomers who use wax should always pick up the tweezers for the final fine-tuning. Spectacular results can also be achieved with threading, a popular South Asian method of hair removal. Working at astonishing speed, the threader anchors one end of the thread between her teeth, holds the other in her hand, makes a tiny loop in the middle and wraps that loop around individual hairs, twisting and pulling. Painful? A bit. But a little “ouch” goes a long way when it comes to cultivating exquisite arches. Here, Bolaños offers seven expert tips.

1. Begin by brushing your eyebrows up and at a slight diagonal, in the direction of hair growth. This will reveal the natural shape of your brow.
2. Using a white highlighter, mark the areas you want to clean up — between your brows, beneath the brow line and far above the brow line. Don’t get too close to the arches; leave that area to the pros.
3. Step away from the mirror after plucking every two or three hairs. No one has perfectly matched eyebrows. You need a bit of distance to see which side needs more work, and to make sure you are creating balance between your brows and your features.
4. It’s best to leave the trimming to the pros, but if you absolutely must do it yourself, be cautious. Brush the hairs up and trim just the very tips to create definition. If you cut into the brows themselves, you’ll create bald spots.
5. Then comb the hairs down. Using brow pencil or powder one shade lighter than your natural color, fill in any sparse areas. Don’t draw a line; instead make tiny strokes just above the hairs.
6. To extend the length of your brow, use a pencil and draw a line that’s just long enough to accentuate the arch. Be subtle. Too long a line will close your eyes in, while a thin tail will make your eyelids look droopy. To create the illusion of individual hairs, use short, feathery strokes.
7. Apply a brow gel to set them as well as add definition and a touch of shimmer.