It goes without saying that the COVID-19 pandemic has caused major change in our daily lives. While everyone who can is (hopefully) helping slow the spread of the virus by staying home, regularly scheduled beauty appointments for treatments like haircuts, eyebrow grooming and manicures—remember manicures?!—are on pause while salons remain temporarily closed. And while a bushy brow is a thing of beauty, seven weeks of letting our arches grow freely means things might be looking a little *too* wild. Since we are the masters of our own beauty routines ATM, we tapped a few top eyebrow pros to share need-to-know tips for how to groom and care for your arches from the comfort of your own home.

Don’t: Go tweezer happy

“The best advice I can give to people trying to maintain their brows until they can see a professional is to tweeze and trim with extreme caution,” says Mary Dang, brow expert and founder of Eye Love Beauty Bar in Toronto. She recommends cleaning up those obvious hairs in-between your brows and just above your eyelids but says to to avoid manipulating the natural arch of your brows. “To be on the safe side, you can create a guideline for yourself,” she says. “Fill in your brows first with pencil and then remove the hairs outside of the pencil line ensuring you don’t go past your guide.”

If you just can’t stay away from your tweezers, follow the expert tips below to ensure you don’t end up with sad, over-plucked arches.

When tweezing, hairs that sit one finger width (or three cm) above your natural brow line are fair game to pluck, says Brittni Alexandra, certified aesthetician and owner of B.Beautiful Studio in Toronto. But she warns against removing any hair from the tail of your brow. “That’s where people make the biggest mistake and usually where they need to grow their hair in.”

Another tweezing “red zone” as Alexandra calls it, is just below the arch of your brow. “You may think your arch begins sooner but it most likely begins later, and you will end up with ‘surprise’-looking brows if you pluck those hairs.”

Take your time. Alexandra advises tweezing one hair at a time to ensure you’re not taking too much off. “Pluck one hair, stand back, assess, and then go back for another.” Plucking even just one wrong hair can make a difference, she warns.

There’s no need to pluck every day, says Bogaert. Instead, clean up your brows every one to two weeks, depending on how quickly your hair grows. “This is essential in brow maintenance as cleaning up your brows everyday will affect the growth cycle and hairs will then grow in at different times,” she says.

Always place your tweezers on an angle when plucking hairs and pull directly from the root. This will prevent hair breakage which results in unwanted little black dots, says Bogaert.