Kristie Streicher is her own best model.
The eyebrow guru and natural beauty—with past clients including Emily Blunt and Rachael Weisz—takes a different approach than the average waxer or threader. Using tweezers alone (which she finds more precise and gentler on the skin), she pioneered her style, “The Feathered Brow,” highlighting thickness and the organic shape of the brow with a less extreme arch. “A little less perfect looks more natural, fresh and young,” she says. “Think Brooke Shields.”
Streicher brought this relaxed look to the Warren Tricomi salon in New York City via her childhood home in Grass Valley, California, near Lake Tahoe. Growing up, her parents were both artistic. Her mother, into D.I.Y. projects, even made her own mineral makeup. (Those creative impulses rubbed off: Kristie Streicher’s two equally “craftsy” sisters—makeup artist Jenn and hair stylist Ashley—are also big names in the beauty world.)
Like her siblings, the eyebrow expert eventually migrated to LA. She straddled both coasts for a bit, and still heads east every eight weeks to service clients, but her home base is in California. “I was feeling so transient, like a gypsy. I had to pick a place and I fell in love with the snowboarding and surfing in LA because I love to be outside,” says Streicher, also a certified yoga instructor and avid hiker. “Growing up in Northern California, you appreciate the outdoors. My parents were such hippies: Nature was kind of our religion. Now I need to connect with the earth.”
No matter how flashy Streicher’s world may get, she is still guided by that relationship with nature: In 2011, she opened her debut Kristie Streicher Beauty Bar inside Warren Tricomi’s new Melrose salon and, as of 2012, began selling a homemade Aforé oil blend that she’d been using on clients for years. Packaged in old-world apothecary-evocative brown dropper bottles, the concoction of virgin organic Moroccan argan oil, aloe vera oil and essential oils of lavender, tangerine, orange, ylang ylang, patchouli and blue tansy softens the hair and skin pre-tweeze. “Aforé helps hairs slide out of the follicles, but also the essential oils smell good and relax people, as I massage the product in,” she explains. The blend can also be used to spot treat peeling sunburns, soften cuticles and the soles of feet and condition eyebrow hair.
Recently, Streicher launched a second product: Après Calming Cream, an anti-microbial blend with aloe vera gel, calendula and essential oils to soothe skin post-tweeze. It also reduces puffiness around the eyes, itchiness from bug bites and sunburn and shaving irritation.
When tweezing at home, Streicher suggests: “Instead of plucking any hair you see come up, give your brows a hiatus to show their personality. People pluck out the sprouts because they grow straight up or hairs towards the ends because they think their brows are too long. But you can keep them arched with a lift to the brow, but let the front grow in a bit, let the ends be looser and less contrived. Then use brow gel to brush them up.”
To read about Kristie Streicher’s Top 10 Beauty Obsessions, go to blog.organicspamagazine.com