Who she is:

The atelier manager for culty Japanese makeup brand Shu Uemura, Soul Lee is a Seoul-born beauty maven who specializes in creating flawless, never overplucked eyebrows and lavish lashes. Discovered in esthetician school by cosmetics icon Bobbi Brown, Lee helped launch Brown’s makeup-artist services at Bloomingdale’s. After jetting around the world for four years as the brand’s beauty ambassador, Lee made the jump to Shu Uemura, and has glammed up Uma Thurman, Ann Curry and Jennifer Jason Leigh.

What she’s like:
An overzealous and undertrained makeup artist shaved my brows last summer, and the left one never completely grew back, so my unbalanced, makeup-free countenance was begging for a pro like Lee. Down-to-earth and bubbly without being annoying, she greets me with a hug and immediately consoles me about follicles that have never returned. Then Lee ushers me into an eensy white treatment room tucked away on Barneys’ cosmetics floor. Her new temporary digs—shared with bikini-line waxers—might be bare bones compared with her former home in the glitzy Shu Uemura boutique, which closed last summer. But Lee’s clients—beauty editors and ladies in the know—have tracked her down like bloodhounds because of her sweet bedside manner, expert eye and virtually painless sessions. After instructing me to perch on a stool, she sizes up the damage and informs me that my eyebrows “grow sideways and not straight down like most Asians.” Her plucking barely registers in my brain since her tweezers are as quick and light as a mosquito, and I’m trying to keep up with the flurry of helpful at-home tips she’s doling out.

“You should trim your brows with scissors and never wax them,” says Lee. “Waxing stretches out the skin. And you should use a Shu Uemura pencil—not because I work for them, but because they’re the best and made out of pure powder. I whittle the tip with an X-Acto knife in 20 seconds so it’s like a flat rectangle and doubles as both brow shadow and pencil.”

After telling me about how Japanese women exfoliate their faces with tiny razors, Lee whips out a pink shaver that looks like a dentist’s implement and uses it to carefully define the tops of my brows. She senses my unease and recommends that I pick up the inexpensive, easy-to-use tool at a Japanese grocery store, since “it’s great for making a clean line. And yes, your hair will grow back but it won’t be thicker.”

When Lee presents a mirror, I figure that her gorgeous, natural-looking work would last me a week before I start to go back to my old, uneven brows and permanent quizzical expression. But after two weeks of minimal maintenance with Shu Uemura tweezers and pencil, and Lee’s advice, I’ve managed to keep my arcs in line. When I do need a touch-up, I’m running immediately to Barneys.

—Helen Yun

Barneys New York, 660 Madison Ave between 60th and 61st Sts (212-833-2525); 30 minutes of brow styling $65, partial lash extensions $100, full lash extensions $400

Photograph: Erkan Said

1 Shu Uemura False Eyelashes Smoky Layers, $25; 2 H9 Formula eyebrow pencil, $22; 3 Slant tweezers, $32; 4 Deepsea Water facial mist in Chamomile, $24; all at shuuemura-usa.com.