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Normani and Ming Lee Simmons’ 24 Year Old Brow Guru Cosigns Putting Castor Oil On Your Brows

The beauty business owner on Melrose has big plans.

It’s not easy to make it in the beauty industry anywhere, but it is especially difficult in Los Angeles, who’s “city of Angels” tagline is not reserved for the cut-throat world of celebrity estheticians. The soft-spoken 24 year old Giselle Soto, owner and founder of Giselle Soto Brows is making it though, after only two years of living in LA and only one year of moving her business outside of her home.

If you’re someone who scrolls through Instagram, constantly eyeing the various tags of celebrities who are shouting out their glam squads, chances are, you’ve seen Giselle’s work. She is responsible for some of the most precise, natural and healthy eyebrows out there. Of course, eyebrows can seem like a nit-picky beauty micro-detail to focus on but eyebrows are also the curtains of the eyes, if you will, and Giselle Soto is making sure they are perfect.

Soto, who hails from Ventura, California started doing brows by accident. She had a “really bad threading experience” and eventually learned to do her own eyebrows. After she volunteered to do the eyebrows of anyone and everyone who asked, a business was born. She decided to take it seriously and enrolled in beauty school and from there, a celebrity eyebrow artist scouted her out via Instagram. After commuting nearly 2 hours from her home in Ventura to Venice Beach for a year, Soto was abruptly fired which took her by surprise. Soto considers herself a perfectionist and she is nothing if not dedicated to her work, so the word 'fired' was never present in her lexicon. Nonetheless, it happened and it actually ended up being a blessing, which is something most people say in response to a tragedy like losing a job, but in this case it’s true.

Soto turned that rejection into an opportunity and it propelled her to open her own business, which is where I meet her on Melrose in LA. Soto’s disposition is probably best described as gentle. Gentle is a key characteristic necessary for anyone wielding hot wax on the regular. Dozens of celebrities agree. Normani, Ming Lee Simmons and Michelle Williams are amongst her client list and when I sat down (née: laid down) in Giselle’s chair, I gave her carte blanche to do whatever she wanted. After discovering that my skin was reacting negatively to the wax, Soto expertly and painstakingly hand-tweezed my eyebrows for 45 minutes to her signature shape and style.

While I can personally confirm that my eyebrows have never looked better, I did want to know how to maintain them at home on my own. Soto’s shop in LA was packed with customers. She sees people every 30 minutes but since I live in NYC, visiting her on Melrose every 4-5 weeks like she recommended is not the most realistic of goals. In the in between time, Soto recommends “exfoliation whenever possible” in addition to castor oil applied nightly. Dirt, sweat and makeup can remain on your brows hindering their growth and creating buildup that leads to breakouts.

So that’s the secret to the stars’ brows looking like they were touched by an angel and if you’re a Giselle Soto client, they were.

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