The frustration that launched Bren Husher’s career is a simple one: the daily task of drawing the same eyebrow shape in the same place. Most people who wear makeup know it. Husher decided, in her early twenties, to spend her working life solving it.
She is the founder of Painted Lady Pigments, a permanent makeup practice in the Denver area that offers cosmetic tattooing across brows, eyes, and lips. By her own account, she is a licensed esthetician and double-certified cosmetic tattoo artist with more than 22 years of practice. Her signature technique is the powder brow, also called an ombre brow, which uses a machine with a single needle to deposit pigment in a soft, pixelated pattern. The studio’s website notes that the approach is designed to suit all skin types, to retain color longer than blade-based microblading, and to need fewer touch-ups over time. The goal, as she has described it, is a fresh, natural look that requires no daily upkeep.
A Career That Started Twice
Getting there took longer than most origin stories suggest. Husher discovered permanent makeup close to accidentally: she was enrolled in an esthetician course when she heard that a permanent makeup instructor nearby was looking for eyebrow models. She signed up. By the end of the session she wanted to train.
What came next was harder than she had expected. In a 2020 feature with VoyageDenver, Husher described renting a small space at a local waxing salon and struggling to fill it. With permanent makeup still unfamiliar to most consumers at the time, she could not cover the rent and shut the room down. She spent several years bartending, keeping the cosmetic work alive for friends and family on the side.
Eventually she returned to the industry with a renewed esthetician license and a second cosmetic tattoo certification. The fear of failure she had carried since the first attempt, she has said, did not disappear, but she learned to work alongside it. She secured a spot at a local salon, grew her schedule, added eyelash extensions to bring clients back between permanent makeup appointments, and eventually outgrew the arrangement. Painted Lady Pigments opened as a standalone studio.
The Work
The services that came together under that standalone studio covered the main categories of permanent cosmetic tattooing. Brow work remained the core, using powder and ombre techniques to create definition without a drawn-on appearance. Alongside that the studio offered lash-line work, a subtle tattooed pigment line that frames the eye naturally; lip tinting, which adds color and outline to the lips; and corrective work for clients whose previous permanent makeup procedures left them unhappy. For corrective cases, the studio’s website notes that Husher offers a free consultation before any work is scheduled.
More recently, the studio added areola reconstruction tattooing, which uses cosmetic pigmentation to restore natural-looking color, shape, and detail to the breast area following surgery or trauma. That service connects to a partnership Husher has announced on the studio’s website with the Sauler Institute, under which she provides complimentary brow and areola procedures to middle- and lower-income breast cancer survivors through the Sharsheret Best Face Forward 2.0 initiative. The studio also expanded its offerings to include tarot readings, sound healing sessions, and Reiki, alongside metaphysical supplies available in-shop. Husher has described these additions on the studio’s website as part of a broader personal project she calls “Paint Your Soul,” which she frames as the direction her work has been heading throughout her entire career.
A Third Rebuild
Then the standalone studio came to an end. Husher moved Painted Lady Pigments into Heart and Dagger, a tattoo shop in Denver, where she continues to see clients and offer her full range of services. In an update on the studio’s website, Husher has written that the challenges of the past year transformed her into a new person.
The arc is recognizable. Each time the ground has shifted, what emerged afterward was more fully realized than what it replaced: from a single rented room, to a salon chair, to a standalone studio, to a presence inside an established tattoo shop that already works in permanent pigment. The Sauler Institute partnership, the spiritual offerings, the corrective work for clients who came in after difficult experiences elsewhere: all of it points toward a practice that has been doing more than solving the brow problem for some time now. Heart and Dagger is the latest chapter. Judging by the ones before it, it will not be the last.
