Anastasia Beverly Hills review

Anastasia Soare was doing eyebrows in a Beverly Hills salon before she was selling anything, and the brand's entire credibility rests on that. The Golden Ratio brow-shaping method is marketing dressed as geometry, but the products it produced are not.

The brow range, which is genuinely the best

Nobody else is close. ABH sells four different approaches to the same problem and each one is properly executed:

• Brow Wiz — a 0.085 g retractable pencil with a tip fine enough to draw individual hairs. The tip breaks if you press; that is the price of a tip that fine.

• Brow Definer — a thicker triangular pencil for filling rather than drawing, faster and more forgiving.

• Dipbrow Pomade — a waterproof cream that holds through swimming and sweat and requires a brush and some skill.

• Brow Freeze — a laminating wax that sets brows upward and holds all day, and comprehensively beats the hairspray-and-spoolie workaround it replaced.

The shade range is the part competitors consistently fail. ABH offers genuinely cool-toned dark shades — Ebony, Granite, Medium Brown with an ashy base — where most brands stop at a warm dark brown that reads red on anyone with cool-toned hair. It also offers Taupe and Blonde options that are not simply a lighter version of the brown.

At $23 to $26 per brow product this is where the money should go.

The palettes

Modern Renaissance (2016) and Soft Glam (2018) are the two that deserved their reputations. Both are well-curated, cohesive, and built around a workable colour story rather than a mood board.

The wider palette output is less consistent, and the specific failure is intra-palette variance. In a single $65 palette you will often find three excellent mattes, two shimmers with heavy fallout, and one matte that is chalky and will not blend — usually a pale or a very saturated shade, which is where pressing is hardest. A palette is only as good as its worst shade, because that is the one that ruins a look halfway through.

Complexion

Luminous Foundation and Magic Touch Concealer are fine. They exist in a category where Fenty, NARS, Rare Beauty and half a dozen drugstore brands are doing the job better or cheaper or both. There is no version of this range that anyone needs to buy, and the effort spent on it is effort not spent on brows.

Transparency

Nothing. No ingredient discussion, no allergen flagging, no published position on anything formulation-related. This is normal for colour cosmetics and it is still worth marking down, because the category norm is not a defence.

The brand is independent — one of very few at this scale that has not sold to a conglomerate — and has kept a consistent cruelty-free position.

How to choose the shade, since nobody explains it

The most common brow mistake is buying a shade matched to hair colour. Brows are almost never the same colour as the hair on your head, and a pencil that matches your hair will usually read too warm and too dark.

The rule that works: go one to two shades lighter than your hair if you are dark-haired, one to two shades darker if you are blonde, and match the undertone rather than the depth. If your hair is cool-toned — ash brown, jet black, platinum — you need an ashy pencil, and this is exactly where most brands leave you with nothing. ABH's Granite, Ebony and Ash Brown exist for that reason.

For a soft, natural result, Brow Wiz with short upward strokes in the sparse areas only. For a defined, photographed brow, Dipbrow with an angled brush. For anyone whose brows will not stay down, Brow Freeze underneath either.

Independence

One more thing worth noting, because it is increasingly rare at this size: Anastasia Beverly Hills is still family-owned. Anastasia Soare and her daughter Claudia run it, there is no conglomerate parent, and the brand has resisted the acquisition path that took nearly every peer of its generation. That independence is the reason it can keep a brow range this granular — a portfolio owner would have rationalised half those shades years ago.

Price

$18 to $65. The brow products are correctly priced for what they are. The palettes are not, and the gap between the best and worst shade in one is the reason.

The verdict

Buy a brow product — Brow Wiz if you want hair strokes, Definer if you want speed, Dipbrow if you need it waterproof, Brow Freeze on top of any of them. Buy Soft Glam if you want one neutral palette and can find it discounted.

Ignore the complexion range. ABH is a specialist that keeps behaving like a generalist, and the specialism is excellent.