Case Study 12: Alopecia Areata Client

Every client is unique and almost every appointment presents new challenges for us. At Tina Davies Studio, we take these moments as an opportunity to learn and grow as artists. It’s through problem-solving that we better our skills and grow the confidence to become the best artists we can be.

Today’s case study will focus on the challenges in creating beautiful, natural-looking eyebrows for clients with alopecia skin. Earlier this year, we collaborated with the Canadian Alopecia Areata Foundation to give away an eyebrow appointment with Kim Anh, our senior artist at Tina Davies Studio. Alopecia areata is a condition that causes hair to fall out in small patches, which can be unnoticeable. These patches may connect, however, and then become noticeable. The condition develops when the immune system attacks the hair follicles, resulting in hair loss.

Alopecia skin is often tricky and performing permanent makeup on alopecia skin is considered an advanced technique. Due to alopecia, the skin can lack active hair follicles, is usually super smooth, and can be very thick or rubbery. It’s sometimes like working on an actual practice pad so you must tattoo with the right combination of needle penetration angle and hand speed to effectively puncture this skin type. As well as this, alopecia skin can be sensitive so you must take measures to make your client as comfortable as possible throughout the procedure.

Our winner, Lisa, is classed as Fitzpatrick type 2 with ‘grape’ skin. Here are the summarized notes:

Skin Colour: Fair (Irish ethnicity)
Eye Colour: Hazel
Natural Hair Colour: Auburn
Sun Reaction: Skin freckles and burns easily

Lisa before and immediately after her procedure.

Lisa is an elementary school music teacher who lost her hair four years ago due to stress. She found that wearing a good wig helped restore her confidence. As an elementary school teacher, her main priority was to look somewhat like herself so that the students weren’t worried that she was ill. Two years ago, she lost her eyebrows and eyelashes, which she found harder to deal with. She had to wear eyebrow and eye makeup every day, which took up a lot of her time.

Lisa’s natural eyebrow shape is very round and arched. She wanted a less severe shape, and that accentuated her features better. After getting to know her personality during the consultation, Kim wanted to create a slightly softer shape to complement Lisa’s kind eyes and sweet face. The extra definition helps to emphasize Lisa’s gorgeous facial features. During the pre-draw, Kim and Lisa both fell in love with the shape and decided to go forward with the procedure.

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Kim pre-drawing Lisa’s shape using the Tina Davies Professional Pro Pencil in ‘Brown’.

As Lisa has almost no hair, Kim and Lisa decided to go ahead with ‘microshading’, a combination of microblading hair strokes AND machine shading. Natural hair strokes were created to mimic hair and shading was used to mimic density especially at the tails and midsection of the eyebrows where no hair exists. Kim wanted to create the most 3-Dimensional, realistic microblading possible and used the Tina Davies Professional Essential 18U Needle Nano Microblade. This blade is Kim’s absolute favourite needle at the moment as it’s great for creating very fine hair strokes.

Kim using the Essential 18 U Needle Nano Microblade to create fine hair-like strokes.

Lisa prefers to wear an auburn-coloured wig and requested that her eyebrows matched that colour. As she has a neutral skin tone, Kim was able to mix a few shades of the Tina Davies I Love Ink collection to customize a colour that will heal into a neutral-warm brown. Kim mixed Medium Brown and Dark Brown with Toffee from the Sunset Collection. Although the I Love Ink collection is already pre-modified to combat ashiness, Toffee will ensure that the healed results are more on the warm-brown side.

Kim shading with the Kwadron 9 Magnum Machine.

We are so happy with how Lisa’s new eyebrows turned out! They instantly transformed her face. As Lisa has normal skin that is not very oily, we expect to see good hair stroke retention when she returns for her follow-up appointment.

Lisa seeing her new eyebrows for the first time!

With her new eyebrows, Lisa can now spend less time worrying about putting on makeup every day and focus more on what she loves most - teaching her lovely students. See Lisa’s testimonial below: