Name me a beauty author who’s waited until her 30s to get Botox. I’ll wait. Seems, you are looking at her. While my colleagues have been getting the needle since well before wrinkles have even had a likelihood to form, I had been putting the coveted treatment on the back burner for years. You see, I won’t go near a needle with a ten-foot pole if I haven’t got to.

While no one has to get Botox — or microneedling, or a vampire facial, or another beauty treatment that involves a pointy object — sometimes said treatments make life somewhat more convenient. As is the case with microblading, a semipermanent service that uses tiny needles to create hair-like strokes for more defined brows. It is a treatment I have been toying with for some time (filling in my brows is my least favorite a part of my routine), but quite frankly, I have not grown the kahunas to truly undergo with it. And now, I needn’t.

Enter the Hard Candy Ultra-Precise Brow Pen and Ghosted Brow Gel. These products won’t deliver the identical semipermanent results as microblading, but they still include impressive endurance, especially when used together with one another. Upon first glance they seem like your standard eyebrow pen and gel, but Laura Lam-Phaure, a Los Angeles-based cosmetic chemist, highlights the proven fact that each formulas contain various varieties of polymers, which helps with each product’s hold and longevity.

Kristen Leonard, makeup artist and Global Director of Artistry for Hard Candy adds so far, noting that the Ultra-Precise Brow Pen, particularly, is supposed to last 16 hours while the Ghosted Brow Gel is waterproof, meaning midday touch-ups are a non-issue. I can attest to each of those facts: a mere swatch of each formulas on my hand lasted through a complete day’s price of hand-washing (PSA: I wash my hands loads).

In line with Lam-Phaure, these polymers also assist with the products’ ease of use, which I’d also need to agree with — starting with the brow pen. As someone who doesn’t have an inventive bone in her body, the product’s felt tip was severely intimidating (I typically lean toward brow pens with a more precise tip just like the Brow Code Imitations Micro Brow Pencil).