As a child I had gorgeous, dark, very thick eyebrows - until I destroyed them. Aged 18, I started beauty school and we would practice tinting and tweezing each other's brows and, when I left in 1997, the year of bushy brows, mine were overplucked.
Aged 19, I started my skincare studio in London. I felt very self-conscious about my thin brows and would diligently pencil them in every day. But then, when I was about 24, things got a lot worse.
I was diagnosed with Hashimoto's disease which is a thyroid issue (I also have Type 1 diabetes). It can make you put on weight and sometimes lose your hair, both of which happened to me.
It meant that my brows got even thinner, which was really upsetting. I took medication to stop my hair from shedding but it didn't help with regrowth.
I tried lots of different ways to heal my body such as cutting out gluten, and even became a health coach but nothing worked.
And I felt I had to keep explaining myself at work. I think a healthy, full brow is like having good skin, nails and hair - people notice.
The clients who trusted me to shape their brows would often say 'don't take too much' and I'd have to explain mine had thinned out by themselves.
I decided the next option was to get my eyebrows tattooed. In 2002 at my London clinic I had a fabulous makeup artist working with me. She was starting to try tattooing brows too, so I thought let's give it a try.
At first, I loved the results. Brow tattooing was different then, it was more like a block of colour rather than a fine line to mimic a hair that you get today with microblading.
But what I didn't realise was that because it was permanent it faded to blue/grey so I had to keep refilling it every two years and the block of 'brow' started to look more and more unnatural.
What's worse, the little hair that had been there was aggravated and started falling out even more. It was so depressing. I hated waking up to these grey, shining brows. I tried to grow a fringe in the hope that would help to hide them, but I hated that too!
Even though my experience of tattooing wasn't great, I decided, foolishly, to try again. We were in lockdown during the pandemic and all the broadcasts and reels I was doing on social media were making me feel self-conscious.
I'm now based in New York where I have my own longevity clinic and a large roster of A-lister clients who come to me for my signature facial and beauty treatments.
I often felt uncomfortable talking to these glamorous people about how to make them look better when my own face was dominated by hideous brows. But the tattoo artist messed it up. She drew the ugliest clown brows. I was upset and realised I needed something more permanent.
I started searching and discovered that there was such a thing as an eyebrow transplant. The model Chrissie Teigen had just become one of the first celebrities to go public about hers. She had her transplant in November 2021 and looked amazing. I decided to go for it.
I went to Dr Anthony Bared in Miami. He is one of the most famous hair transplant surgeons in the US.
Plus, he did the Follicular Unit Extraction technique I wanted, which uses individual hairs and leaves no scarring on the scalp rather than the traditional technique which takes a strip of hair from your head. It's a complicated eight-hour procedure.
I was awake but numbed so there was no pain, but the prodding felt gruesome. It's the most dramatic thing I've done.
I opted to transplant 850 hairs as I wanted a really full brow look, which meant they took 850 individual hairs from the back of my head one by one. Two nurses extracted the hairs, cleaned them, analysed them, and put them in a petri dish.
Once they'd all been sterilised, the nurses decided which hairs went where. Some hairs are implanted in different places depending on what kind of look you want and what area of the brow needs to be thicker. Before the extraction, my surgeon had drawn on the shape of the brow I wanted.
I certainly didn't walk out of the clinic looking like Brooke Shields! I looked awful for a week from the swelling and bruising. My eyes were black and blue and painful. Then, my brows fell out and I started to panic.
Had I invested all that money, put myself through eight hours of surgery, only to look no different? I went through a period of having no eyebrow hair at all but Dr Bared said it was part of the process.
In the end it took six months, so you have to be patient. When they do grow back, you have to 'train' them. At first they were going left, right, forward, backwards. I had to brush them daily and used a brow gel to set them so they'd grow in one direction. As it's hairs from my head, they grow faster than regular brow hairs!
These days my morning routine is: wake up, brush my teeth and then brush and trim my brows. I use an brow clipper which it makes it a lot easier.
I had to wait a year after my hair grew back before having my tattoos removed by laser. The transplant cost £12,000 and a further £8,000 on the laser removal, but I don't regret it.
I'm so happy with my makeover and it's made me look much younger and given me more confidence. I love having brows - and will never use a tweezer on them again.