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Compositionally it is Eyeshadow in brow shades: talc, mica or sericite as the base, iron oxides for colour, a binder to hold the pan together. What distinguishes it is the shade tuning — brow powders are built cooler and more muted than eyeshadows, because warmth is what makes a filled brow look artificial.

The difference from a pencil is where the pigment goes. A pencil deposits on the skin between the hairs as a line; powder deposits on both hair and skin as a diffuse veil. Diffuse reads as density; a line reads as a drawing. That is why powder is the format recommended for anyone whose filled brows keep looking harsh.

• Cool and light. Taupe, ash brown, soft grey. Too warm is the standard error, and it is more visible in powder than in pencil because powder covers more area.
• Angled brush, tapped out first. Powder brow products deposit far more on the first touch than expected.
• Start at the arch, work outward, and do the inner third last with whatever is left on the brush. The inner brow should always be the lightest part; a dark, defined inner edge is the single most ageing brow mistake.
• Follow with a spoolie.
• Set with Eyebrow Gel — powder alone brushes off against a pillow, a scarf or a hand.

Powder holds badly on oily skin and on brows that get touched, which is the argument for a pencil or a tinted gel instead. It also does not work well on genuinely bare skin where no hair remains — with nothing to catch on, it reads as a shadow. For sparse or absent brows, a fine pencil drawing individual strokes is the better tool.

The conventional professional order: pencil for the sparse gaps, powder to diffuse and unify, gel to set. Most people need one of the three, not all of them; the stack is a stage and photography technique and it looks like one in daylight.

Cosmetic in the US — FDA primary category (03) eye makeup preparations, because the brow is part of the eye area:

• Only colour additives approved for eye-area use may be present, and certified colours must come from FDA-certified batches. Iron oxides and permitted inorganics do essentially all the work here.
• The mercury carve-out — mercury compounds are prohibited except as an eye-area preservative at ≤65 ppm, and only where no other safe and effective preservative is available.
• Under MoCRA the small-business exemption from registration and listing does not apply to products that regularly contact the mucous membrane of the eye.
• FDA's December 2022 final guidance recommends a maximum of 10 ppm lead in externally applied cosmetics.

Talc in a brow powder raises the same unresolved question as every cosmetic powder: talc is permitted, asbestos contamination makes a cosmetic adulterated, and MoCRA's directed rulemaking on standardised asbestos testing was proposed in December 2024 and withdrawn in November 2025.

18–24 months after opening, as for any pressed powder. The practical limit is the brush, which returns sebum and skin flora to the pan and eventually forms a hard glaze — scrape it off rather than pressing harder. Wash the brush.

Stop using every eye-area product at the first sign of an eye infection, discard what was in use, and see a clinician. Do not share it.

• Makeup — the shelf this sits on, and the rest of it.
• Cosmetics — what the label is legally allowed to say, and the full catalogue.
• The rest of Brows — Eyebrow Pencil · Eyebrow Gel.
• Eyeshadow — the same chemistry, and the same colour-additive constraint.
• Regulatory statements here follow the FDA and EU sources listed on Cosmetics, read 16 August 2026.