Easy Drugstore Brow Pomade: NYX Dip, Shape, Go!

Over the last few months, my daily makeup looks have been much more basic than usual— mostly focusing on the basics to help polish my favorite features to play up, such as my brows. Even when the rest of my face is pretty bare, doing my brows just makes me feel more like myself. With the weather getting hotter recently (we’re already seeing triple digits this week), I need to make sure my daily brow product can hang in there so that they look great hours into a sweaty day.

The NYX Dip, Shape, Go! Longwear Brow Pomade is the newest brow product from the brand. It’s supposed to give you instantly shaped, high-impact brows with a waterproof finish. Since it’s an all-in-one product, you don’t need anything else to finish the look. You get the pomade, an angled brush and spoolie together in one tube.

I do like the convenience of this design, since if you’re actually on-the-go, you don’t need to grab anything extra. However, the product breaks up in to four different plastic parts: the cap, the brush/spoolie, the length of the tube (empty/what stores the brush) and the pomade-storing bottom. That’s a lot of small parts that can be misplaced if you’re taking it apart while out and about. Also, the brush can be a bit awkward to hold since you only have about 3/4 of an inch to hold onto.

Aside from that, let’s talk about the actual pomade. It’s super soft and creamy, but still lightweight and can be blended through the brows very easily. What I like about this product is that it doesn’t leave your brows slicked down and stiff like many other pomades do. You can easily get a softer appearance with this product but just as easily go for a bold brow. Either way, the look remains natural and never block-y. It’s hassle-free, and pretty fool proof! You also have some time before it sets in case you need to clean up the edges, add more color, or take away!

While this is waterproof, it’s important to note that it’s not smudge-proof nor transfer-proof. Even after letting it set for a while, if I rubbed at my brow I would get color transfer onto my hands. With that said, even if water didn’t disturb the look on it’s own, as soon as you rub at your brows, the product will come off. So while sweating alone didn’t make the product fade or break up, as soon as I wiped at my brow it started to disappear. If you’re smart about it, though, you can avoid the product fading with sweat as long as you remember to dab— don’t wipe— if you feel the urge to dry off any dampness.

My only other complaint is one that I have with most NYX brow products: the shades. I currently have black hair, and my natural brow shade is a very cool dark brown. I’ve tried many NYX brow products over the years and have not once been able to find something that matches me. They always lean very warm, even when the shade is portrayed as cool online and on the product packaging. Both of the Dip, Shape, Go! pomades I have are too warm for me, Espresso being the biggest let down because it’s depicted as a soft cool black. It’s more of a dark chocolate, where Ash Brown leans very yellow on me.

Other than those couple of gripes, I actually really like the pomade formula here. I like having the strong brow effect with a hint of softness that this offers. I really would actually like the pomade sold separately so that I could get more product and use my own brush, because it’s so nice for bold, yet natural, brows.

You can find the NYX Dip, Shape, Go! Longwear Brow Pomade for $11 at Ulta Beauty.