I was so embarrassed by my eyebrows I couldn’t leave the house. A miracle same-day fix changed my life… but I have one regret: GABRIEL ZAMORA

Forget about waxing, tweezing and plucking, there’s a new treatment on the market that’s taking over the beauty industry – and this one is for eyebrows.

But the eyebrow transplant doesn’t come cheap. This procedure could cost patients up to $25,000.

Patients all over the world are now taking hair grafts from their head and transplanting them onto their brow bone in order to create a naturally thicker, bushier look. 

While women were once encouraged to strip away any excess hairs, keeping their brows thin and arched, the trend these days is the thicker the better. Celebrities like Kendall Jenner and Hailey Bieber have recently been sporting these fuller brows, as many millennials are slowly trying to pick up the pieces left by the damage they created from years of over-plucking in the 1990s and 2000s.

‘Some patients don’t have enough eyebrow hair to make them feel good about themselves,’ Honolulu-based plastic surgeon Dr Shim Ching, of Asia Pacific Aesthetics, told the Daily Mail.

‘Sometimes eyebrows are lost with chemical bleaching or dyes,’ Ching explained. ‘A patient may feel as if fuller eyebrows would make them more attractive.’

In New York City, patients are paying anywhere from $14,000 to $25,000 to join in on the style – but it is no walk in the park. 

Taking hours under sedation and leaving patients with temporary swelling, scabbing and, in some cases, serious pain, the procedure is a real undertaking. 

Just ask Los Angeles-based beauty influencer Gabriel Zamora, 33, who was one of the early adopters – undergoing the procedure at the beginning of 2021. 

Zamora had always felt insecure about his thin and sparse brows, especially after an acting teacher told him that his face ‘didn’t read well on camera’ – and that he needed to put more makeup around his eye area.

‘I started to play with brow products,’ Zamora, who has a social media following of over one million, explained to the Daily Mail.

‘I started to really realize, I can make them more prominent, fill them in, make them thick, make them thin, I really started to play with it.

‘It became like an obsession, where I didn’t want to leave my house without eyebrows, because I liked how that looked.’

After making a solo move to Los Angeles from Houston, Texas, where he grew up, Zamora began to hear more and more about eyebrow transplants from friends and even beauty influencers online, including celebrity stylist and founder of OUAI, Jen Atkin. 

Zamora began to research the surgery in 2017, but it wasn’t until a few years later that he felt financially comfortable enough to go through with it – not to mention, the procedure was starting to grow in popularity.

The beauty influencer had the same-day procedure done by a doctor in Dallas, Texas, and spent around $8,500 on the operation, where he transplanted around 750 extracted hairs from his head into his brows. 

When he got to the doctor, they first sketched out the new shape of his eyebrows with a Sharpie, and then got to work.

The doctor numbed the back of Zamora’s head with a local anesthetic, as they extracted his hair follicles for three hours. 

After that was finished, he took a break for lunch before continuing on with the rest of the transplanting. Zamora told the Daily Mail they ended up having to extract a few more hairs to get his desired look.

But when all was said and done, everything looked ‘perfect,’ he shared.

However, it was short-lived. 

What followed was some ‘gnarly’ swelling and bruising for a few days, along with his eyebrows completely falling out just a few weeks later, leaving him without visible hair while the transplanted follicles stay in place. 

It’s a normal part of the procedure, according to doctors, but still can be quite jarring for patients. 

‘I had random long hairs on my eyebrows, and I was like, “What did I just do to my face? Oh, my God. Like, what did I do?”‘ Zamora recalled. 

‘It scabs up, then you remove the scabs, and then I had hairs,’ he continued. 

‘I was like, “Oh my God, this is all I’ve been dreaming about, everything,” and then within like, two or three weeks of getting it done, they just fall off.’ 

According to board-certified dermatologist Dr Morgan Rabach of New York City’s Rabach Aesthetics, the shedding is just another step toward getting those thick, gorgeous eyebrows. 

‘You are kind of looking at a hair cycle, similar to the hair transplant, where you’re looking at nine months to a year for the final result,’ Rabach, who did not treat Zamora, told the Daily Mail.

‘The good news about that is that during that timing, you really only see, on your face, the evidence of a transplant for a week to two… it’s actually not that noticeable.’

She said that oftentimes, you will still be penciling in your eyebrows for up to one year – but once the hair grows in, it’s there to stay.

Zamora said he started to see a lot of hair growth by month four.

Eyebrow transplant patients should not expect their new brows to behave and feel exactly like they did before. 

The hair texture will likely not be the same as what some are used to from their old eyebrows, as harvested follicles from your head can feel different. In addition, they sometimes grow to be quite long and straight, which means you’ll have to cut them in a particular way.  

Eyebrow transplants have only recently gained more widespread attention due to the increase in social media discussion about plastic surgery, Rabach told the Daily Mail. 

In recent years, she has seen an increase in patients wanting the procedure – thanks to its popularity via celebrities like Chrissy Teigen and Robin McGraw (Dr Phil’s wife). 

‘This is a way of getting full eyebrows that are natural and are your own body, that you don’t actually have to maintain like you would microblading,’ Rabach explained. 

Now, Zamora has to trim his brows once a week, which is a huge change from barely having any eyebrows at all just a few years ago.

‘I have not thought about not having eyebrows in years,’ the beauty influencer said, explaining that the surgery ‘changed his life.’ 

‘I look at old photos and I forget who that person was,’ he said. ‘And not in a bad way. It’s just that I no longer have that insecurity.’

But he does have one regret from the surgery.

‘With any surgery, you’re never going to be 100 percent happy, because there’s no such thing as 100 percent results,’ Zamora explained to the Daily Mail.

‘For me, personally, I wish I would have added just a few more hairs in the center to bring them in closer, and just added a few more hairs in the tail.’

But in the end, he said it wasn’t worth it to go through the entire procedure again just to transplant a few more hairs.  

‘I want to add a total of like 12 to 15 more hairs if I could to the brows, but I don’t feel like going through that whole process again and spending that much money,’ Zamora admitted.

He added that it’s definitely not a ‘lunchtime procedure,’ warning readers that they shouldn’t go through with the treatment if they’re only looking to add a handful of hairs to their brows.

But for those who have been seeking answers for years, he said, the results just might be worth the effort.

‘I don’t want to say that surgeries will fix any insecurity, that’s not what I feel like surgeries are always about,’ Zamora said. 

But, he noted, it could be something that helps you move forward with confidence.