At twenty/twenty beauty, we’re passionate about ocular health. Healthy eyes are beautiful eyes, and we strive to educate everyone about the importance of ditching hazardous beauty habits and formulas in favor of using clean, good-for-you products to enhance your eyes. It makes sense that treatments like lash growth serums and makeup like mascara, eyeliner, and eyeshadow could harm your eyes if not carefully formulated, but most people don’t even consider the value of a clean brow gel. After all, it’s not touching the lash line, right?

The truth is that the entire area is extremely delicate, and even products applied to the perimeter of the eyes could affect their health. For example, we already know that using eye creams that contain retinol are dangerous as retinoids can kill the meibomian glands, the tiny organs that produce the oils that prevent your tears from evaporating too quickly. The skin around the eyes is very, very thin. Anything applied to the area can absorb and inevitably affect the health and function of your eyes.

That brings us to brow gel. While brow gels are typically better for the eye area as they’re brushed through the brows, rather than painted or sketched onto the skin (which could congest the follicles and inhibit healthy growth in addition to being absorbed), they can still be potentially dangerous. While the European Union carefully regulates the formulas of beauty products and has restricted the use of approximately 2,000 ingredients, the United States’ FDA has only banned around a dozen ingredients from use. Though many beauty brands have decided to follow the lead of the EU and not formulate with those ingredients, not all ascribe to those ideals. All those questionable ingredients make it into makeup products, and when they’re applied, harmful ingredients can leach into your skin. 

Risky ingredients that are commonly found in brow gels include polyacrylamide, paraffin waxes, beeswax, and PVPs, as well as many dyes that are known to be irritants or carcinogens, such as carbon black. While that may be fine for traditional cosmetics brands, we won’t formulate with those ingredients or others when developing the products for our eye-friendly beauty brand. Our founder, board-certified ophthalmologist Dr. Diane Hilal-Campo handpicks each ingredient, choosing only those that are recognized to be safe for ocular health. That includes our new Full Brows Tinted Gel. 

Full Brows only uses nourishing ingredients to help tint and tame brows, including castor oil, which is recognized for its ability to promote healthy hair growth, and panthenol, a derivative of vitamin B5 that helps hair stay hydrated and soft. Instead of a stiff or “crunchy” hold, it offers a gentle, flexible hold that keeps your brows comfortably in place. We only get one set of eyes — why risk their health when you can use clean, eye-friendly formulas instead?