It's 2021, we are still in lockdown and with everything closed here in the UK, we have spent a lot of time over the past year trying to find ways to maintain our beauty routines without being able to go to a beauty therapist for our regular treatments. With that comes the development of useful beauty hacks to make life a little easier and one of them is Tweezerfile. I have to admit, I have never considered the fact that tweezers can go dull or that you can file them to bring them back to life. If they stop working you just get a new pair right? Now obviously that way of thinking is wasteful and definitely not environmentally friendly. So Tweezerfile seems like the perfect solution! But why has nobody thought of it before? I caught up with founder Lucy Zender to find out more. Let's meet Lucy!
Welcome Lucy, it's so nice to meet you! So Tweezerfile, what an interesting concept. How did it come about?
I met my husband back in 2007 and I remember my tweezers being blunt, I could not grab any individual hairs with it. So I said to my husband "I need to go out and get a new pair" and he was so surprised because aren't they made of stainless steel? He said he had a knife sharpener and told me I could sharpen them like a knife. He was really surprised that I just wanted to throw them in the bin but it wasn't something I had ever thought of. So that's how the idea started. Why be wasteful with something that is made of stainless steel and can be used over and over again?
I asked around in the beauty industry and found that beauticians used to get their tweezers sharpened, but were now throwing them away every single month. That seemed crazy to us. We found that big tweezer brands could have released a tweezer sharpener years ago, but they have no incentive to develop a product to maintain their tweezers. It does not fit with their business model as they want their customers to keep buying new tweezers. Some brands do offer the option to get tweezers sharpened however, you would have to pay the postage to send the tweezers which are then sent across various countries and take 6 weeks to return. That felt environmentally unsustainable and we hoped that when we launched Tweezerfile, it would be disruptive to that market.
Tweezers are made of stainless steel but they often come wrapped in lots of plastic which is adding to the problem of plastic waste we are currently dealing with. The main driver to develop Tweezerfile was to stop that endless consumption, to stop being economically wasteful and environmentally damaging. It felt like a really obvious solution.
We then Googled 'how to sharpen tweezers' and found several million hits. Clearly, a lot of people were looking for a solution, so that was eyeopening. There was the curiosity of can we develop the product and bring it to market? Which to be honest, has been a lot more challenging than we had anticipated. My husband is an industrial designer, so he designed the product and knew manufacturers but it has been a real journey to bring the product to market. It is a lot harder than creating a product that you think people will need and people buying it.
So it's a handy little tool with a file on either side - how do we use the Tweezerfile?
It's very easy to use. You hold the Tweezerfile in one hand and grip your tweezers over the Tweezerfile with your other hand, ensuring the tweezer blades are flat against either side of the Tweezerfile. You then slowly move the tweezers up and down the Tweezerfile the way you would use a nail file. After a few strokes, your tweezers should be as good as new and ready to use.
The Tweezerfile is also very multipurpose. It doesn't just file tweezers but also removes glue residue from for instance, applying false eyelashes. It also acts as an excellent nail file for removing gel nails. Emery boards and glass nail files tend to splinter the gel polish but this doesn't. We have also found through lockdown that the file is great at removing super glue off your skin!
Going back to the importance of sustainability, the Tweezerfile currently contains plastic. Are there any plans to make it plastic-free in the future?
Yes, so the Tweezerfile is currently made out of stainless steel and plastic however we have recently moved from a manufacturer in China to one in Germany and we have been looking at a variety of materials to make it even more sustainable. The Tweezerfile is incredibly long-lasting and the blades especially should last forever however, we are looking at options including making it plastic-free. I am studying sustainability on the side so I am very conscious that where we can, we should not be using plastic.
Where can people buy Tweezerfile?
Tweezerfile is currently available on www.tweezerfile.com and on Amazon.
Have you always worked or wanted to work in the beauty industry?
Not at all - I am a lawyer in a very different field. I have never been in the beauty industry and knew very little about it. It was very difficult to get into the beauty industry as it is dominated by big brands with large budgets. It has been a challenge to try and break through and Covid has made it even more difficult as we have been unable to go to trade fairs and promote our product that way. We are currently working with our PR company and influencers to try and get the word out there and raise brand awareness.
One of the main things we have seen during lockdown is people having to adapt to maintaining their brows at home rather than being able to visit a beauty therapist. Over the years there have been various eyebrow trends from over-plucked, very thin lines in the 90s to the full, feathery brows we are currently seeing. What tips do you have for maintaining brows at home?
My history with my brows is not great because I tend to pick mine with my hands when I am stressed, so most of the time I try and grow them. There are some basic rules I believe are good to follow in terms of brow maintenance. For instance, tweeze your brows when you come out of the shower because the skin tends to be softer and it is less difficult to get the hairs. When shaping the eyebrows, I follow a very simple technique to map out the shape using an eyebrow pencil to make sure the shape is in the right place.
I hold a pencil along the side of my nose to see where the brow should start, then point through the pupil to see where the arch of the brow should be and finally along the outer corner of the eye to see where the brow should finish. I use that as a template and then fill them in with for instance a brow pencil or light powder. If my brows go crazy, I use a comb to brush them up and cut them into shape. On a night out, I might quickly set my brows in place with a brow gel.
Sometimes I use a serum in my brows to help them grow, but generally I do not have any issues with growing my brows. My brows are quite heavy with thick dark hair so I don't have to do much with them.
Do you have any tips for people whose brows are sparse and thin?
Be very grateful for lockdown! I remember getting my brows waxed in the 90s and coming out with thin pencil line brows. The current advice seems to be to not overpluck and I think you have to be really cautious in terms of how you use your eyebrow pencil if you have overplucked your eyebrows - go light rather than dark, stay true to the natural colour of your brows and think about using serums to stimulate growth.
What are your plans for Tweezerfile for the future? Will other products be released?
We have been working on finding the perfect pair of tweezers that are good quality but also made relatively close by so we could see them and visit the manufacturer. We have found an old family business that has been around for hundreds of years. We met the family at a trade fair and have been trialling their tweezers for a while now with one of our local beauticians. So we are hopeful that they will be the quality we are after.
We are also changing the materials for Tweezerfile and we have changed our packaging in order to make that fully recyclable.
And we are currently working on building a community around beauty hacks, solving problems and challenging fast consumption so that we can decide what's next. What I would love to do is bring products to life with that community, but at the moment it is very focused on Tweezerfile and getting the brand out there.
Well I am very excited to see what the future holds for Tweezerfile. Lucy, thank you so much for taking the time to speak to me.
To my readers, I hope you have found this intetesting and as always, thank you so much for reading.
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