The most striking thing about Bren Husher’s career in permanent makeup is not the technique she has spent over two decades developing, or the studio she built around it, or even the expansion into spiritual services she has been working toward in recent years. It is the number of times she has started over.
By the account she has shared publicly and most recently with this publication, Husher lost her Aurora, Colorado studio over the past year, the space she had been operating under the Painted Lady Pigments name for several years as a standalone clinic. She is currently working out of Heart and Dagger Tattoo, a Denver-area shop where she has continued her permanent makeup practice under the same brand. That makes three significant rebuilds by any count. The first came before the studio ever opened.
The First Attempt, and What Came After
Husher came to permanent makeup in her early twenties. She enrolled at a local cosmetology school, earned her esthetics license, and almost immediately made a sideways turn into cosmetic tattooing after encountering a permanent makeup instructor who was looking for eyebrow models. She signed up to model, stayed to train, and left with a specialty she describes as feeling immediately right for her, a way of combining the hands-on creative work she had gravitated toward since childhood with something people actually needed every day.
What followed was not straightforward. Permanent makeup was not yet the established beauty category it has become. Social media was nascent and not particularly useful to a sole operator trying to fill a rented room in a suburban waxing salon. Clients came infrequently. The overhead outlasted the income. She shut down.
She took up bartending. It paid well and occupied the time. She has said in a March 2020 profile in VoyageDenver that she kept doing permanent makeup throughout that period for friends and family, practicing while the formal business lay dormant. She described fear of failure as the primary obstacle she had faced during those years, and characterized it as something more internal than external.
When she eventually renewed her esthetics license and completed a second permanent makeup certification, she found a spot at a local salon, built a steadier client base, and eventually opened her own clinic: Painted Lady Pigments, with its own studio space in Aurora.
What She Specializes In, and Why
The choice to build her practice around the powder brow technique, also known as the ombre brow, was a deliberate one. The method uses a machine with a single needle rather than the hand-held blade that microblading requires, and Husher explains on the Painted Lady Pigments website that this distinction matters in several ways. By her account, the approach produces a softer, pixelated finish that mimics the appearance of powder-filled brows, avoids the skin trauma she associates with blade-based procedures, and retains color better over time, requiring fewer touchup sessions. She also notes that the method is compatible with all skin types, which she describes as a meaningful practical advantage over microblading for a broader range of clients.
The rest of the service menu extends from similar thinking. Lip blush provides a semi-permanent tint that reads as natural rather than applied. Lash-line eyeliner tattooing adds definition without the daily application time of conventional liner. Corrective work addresses permanent makeup that has faded poorly or shifted in color, and Husher offers free consultations for those cases.
Areola reconstruction tattooing, a restorative cosmetic procedure for clients who have undergone breast surgery, is also part of what she offers, and she has indicated on the studio’s website an intention to extend these services to breast cancer survivors, including those who are middle to low income.
What runs through all of it is a preference she has described as the “I woke up this way” aesthetic: results that do not announce themselves, brows that stay put without daily filling in, lips that hold color without maintenance, lashes that eliminate the need for mascara. The goal, in her framing, is that the work should become invisible as effort once it’s complete.
Paint Your Soul
The Painted Lady Pigments website has taken on a wider scope in recent messaging. Alongside the cosmetic tattooing menu, Husher has introduced what she calls “Paint Your Soul,” an extension of the studio that encompasses tarot readings, metaphysical supplies, and free weekly group sessions. She describes it on the site as a project she has been building toward throughout her life, one that came into sharper focus after a period of personal transformation she characterizes as significant.
The pairing of permanent makeup services with this kind of spiritual offering is uncommon in the permanent makeup industry. How clients receive both sides of what the business now represents is still being established.
The Pattern
Husher is now at Heart and Dagger Tattoo, working under her own brand from a space she did not build. It is a familiar position. The bartending years saw something similar: the practice continuing inside a container that was not designed for it, the business identity staying intact even as the setting changed around it.
The specific circumstances that led to losing the Aurora studio are hers to describe, and she has not detailed them publicly. What the arc of the last two decades does suggest is that the studio space itself has always been secondary to the practice. Painted Lady Pigments has existed in a waxing salon, in its own clinic, and now inside a tattoo shop, and through each version the work has stayed recognizably the same.
By the studio’s own account, Husher has been practicing for over 22 years and holds dual certifications in cosmetic tattooing alongside her esthetics license. Current services and booking information are at heartanddaggertattooshop.com.