What does Nirvana PMU charge for microblading?

At my studio in Shorewood, IL, microblading is $650 for the first session and $150 for the touch-up at 6-8 weeks, which is a separate appointment and not included in the $650. After that, a refresher is $300 whenever your brows have faded enough that you want them back, usually 12-18 months later. The consultation is free.

How much does microblading cost in the Chicago suburbs?

I can only vouch for my own prices. At Nirvana PMU in Shorewood, the first session is $650 and the touch-up at 6-8 weeks is $150, so the complete first year is $800, and a refresher is $300 when the pigment fades, usually 12-18 months later. When you compare studios, ask what each quote covers, the touch-up especially, before you compare the numbers.

What is the total first-year investment for microblading?

Your first-year investment at my studio is $800: the $650 first session plus the required $150 touch-up at 6-8 weeks. There are no separate consultation, aftercare, or numbing fees. The $300 refresher comes later, once the pigment has faded enough that you want it back, which for most people is 12-18 months out.

Is microblading worth the investment?

For most people who are tired of drawing their brows on, yes, but not because it saves money on products. By my own tally, brow products run $207-379 a year and the routine takes about 162 hours a year. On my menu, five years of microblading comes to $1,400-2,000, in the same range as five years of those products ($1,035-1,895). What changes is the time: about 157 of those hours come back to you every year.

Why does quality microblading cost more than a deal or flash sale?

My price covers 10+ years of doing brows and nothing else, mapping drawn to your own bone structure rather than a stencil, pigment mixed for the color it heals to rather than how it looks on day one, and a disposable manual tool opened for you alone. The most expensive path I see is the deal that heals wrong: the client pays for it, sometimes pays again to have it lightened, and then pays for the brows she wanted in the first place.

What is included in the $650 microblading session?

The $650 first session is one 90-minute appointment: a consultation about your brows and goals, custom mapping and design, color mixed for your skin, numbing, the microblading itself, an aftercare kit to take home, and my answers by text while you heal. The touch-up at 6-8 weeks is a separate $150 appointment that finishes the process.

How much does microblading cost per year over five years?

On my menu, five years of microblading comes to $1,400-2,000, or about $280-400 a year. The $800 first year is fixed. After that, each $300 refresher happens when your brows have faded enough that you want them back, usually every 12-18 months, which means three or four in that span and $1,700-2,000 in all. Wait longer between them and it is two, $1,400. It is a front-loaded investment, not a subscription.

Do most people get the annual microblading refresher every year?

No — and I will not pretend otherwise. Realistically, only about a third of clients come back for a yearly refresher, not the 90% the industry likes to claim. The rest stretch it to 18 months or longer because semi-permanent pigment fades slowly and gracefully. The required $150 touch-up at 6-8 weeks is the second half of your first-year process; the annual refresher after that is genuinely optional, on your timeline.

Is microblading cheaper than getting an eyebrow tattoo?

A traditional eyebrow tattoo can carry a lower price upfront, but it is built to stay. Ink set deep in the skin does not fade on its own, so if the shape dates or the color shifts blue, gray, or orange, fixing it means removal sessions first and new work after. My microblading is $650 for the first session and $150 for the touch-up, with semi-permanent pigment that fades over 12-18 months, so a shape you outgrow softens instead of needing removal.

Microblading Cost: $650 First Session, Honest Breakdown

How Much Does Microblading Cost in Illinois?

Microblading at my studio in Shorewood is $650 for the first session and $150 for the touch-up at 6-8 weeks, a separate appointment, so your first year is $800. After that, a refresher is $300 whenever your brows have faded enough that you want them back, usually 12-18 months later. That’s the whole menu.

I’m not going to bury the number and make you scroll through 2,000 words to find it.

At my studio (Nirvana PMU in Shorewood, IL), microblading is $650 for the first session. The required touch-up at 6-8 weeks is a separate $150. A refresher is $300. For a wider benchmark, the Society of Permanent Cosmetic Professionals puts the average permanent cosmetic procedure at $400-$800, with advanced work charged at $150 to $250 an hour. What a number buys is the part worth comparing, so I’ll show you everything behind mine.

There. Now you know.

But the question underneath “how much?” is usually a bigger one: is it worth it?

That’s a different question entirely. And the honest answer depends on who you are, what your mornings look like, and how much your time is actually worth to you.

Let me break it all down—no sales pitch, just math and straight talk, including the parts of the math that don’t flatter microblading.

The Full Price Breakdown

Let’s get specific, because vague pricing drives me crazy and I’d bet it drives you crazy too.

The First Session: $650

This is where everything starts: one 90-minute appointment, and everything below is inside that number.

A consultation first — I look at your natural brows, talk through what you want, and assess your skin type, because your skin type decides how you’ll care for your brows while they heal. Not everyone is a good candidate for microblading, and I’d rather tell you that before you spend a dollar than after.

Custom brow mapping and design — I measure your face to six reference points on your own bone structure and design a shape that works for YOUR face. Not someone else’s face. Not a trending shape from Instagram. Yours. This is where most of the 90 minutes goes. I show you the finished map, and no pigment touches your skin until you’ve approved it.

Custom color mixing — I don’t pull a pre-made pigment off the shelf. I mix your color to your natural hair tone and skin undertone, and for how it will heal, not how it looks the day you leave. In my experience healed brows settle 30-40% lighter than they look on day one, so I mix for the brows you’ll have in a month, not the ones you’ll see in the mirror that afternoon.

The microblading itself — Individual hair-like strokes, placed one at a time with a disposable manual tool. As each stroke goes in I listen for a faint velcro sound; that’s how I know the depth is right. Over 3,500 treatments and 10+ years of doing brows only go into every one.

Numbing — Applied before and during the session.

Aftercare kit — Everything you need for proper healing, including aftercare balm and detailed instructions.

Follow-up support — Questions during healing? Text me. I mean it.

The Touch-Up: $150

Microblading is a two-appointment process, and the touch-up is a separate $150 — it is not included in the $650. I explain it with paint: the first session lays the foundation coat, and the touch-up at 6-8 weeks is the second coat, filling in whatever healed uneven so it all reads as one even coat. Your skin heals in its own way, so some strokes hold perfectly and others soften while they heal. At the touch-up I fill those in, adjust the color, and fine-tune the shape now that it has settled. It runs up to 90 minutes, the same block as your first session.

This is a required part of the process. Without it, you’re leaving results on the table.

Annual Refresher: $300

Semi-permanent pigment fades over roughly 12-18 months, closer to 10-12 if your skin is excessively oily, and the refresher brings your brows back to full strength whenever you decide you want that. It’s up to 90 minutes and $300, and it runs on your timeline, not a calendar’s.

Your total investment over 2 years: $800-1,100 ($800 in year one for the session + touch-up, plus $300 if you need a refresher in year two).

Sarah Delaney smiling against a white background, pointing to her open palm as if presenting something — Year one is two numbers: $650 and $150.

Now Let’s Talk About What You’re Currently Spending

I did a deep dive on the real time and cost of your daily brow routine, and the numbers are eye-opening — though not always in the direction people expect.

The Product Costs

These are my own estimates, item by item, at drugstore to mid-range prices:

Brow pencils (replaced 3x/year): $60-90
Powder or pomade (replaced 2x/year): $40-70
Brushes (replaced yearly): $12-25
Brow gel (replaced 3x/year): $45-84
Concealer for cleanup (replaced 2x/year): $20-60
Makeup remover: $30-50

Annual product cost, by my tally: $207-379

If you buy high-end brands, your number runs higher than mine.

Over Two Years

Products only: $414-758 Microblading: $800-1,100

Over two years, microblading is the bigger number — at the low end of my tally, close to twice as much. I’m not going to pretend otherwise. What the products don’t do is give you back your mornings.

Over Five Years

Products: $1,035-1,895 Microblading: $1,400-2,000

That second line is real arithmetic on my menu. Year one is $800. If you refresh every 12-18 months, that’s three or four $300 refreshers in the span, so $1,700-2,000 in all. If you wait longer between refreshers, as plenty of my clients do, it’s two of them, so $1,400. (If your skin is excessively oily and you refresh every 10-12 months, that span can hold a fifth refresher, which brings it to $2,300.)

The two ranges overlap. At the top of my product tally, five years of microblading is about the same money; at the bottom, the products come out lower. Microblading doesn’t win on product spend alone, and I’d rather you hear that from me. Where it wins is the next section.

But Wait—What About Your Time?

Products are just the financial cost. Let’s talk about the cost nobody puts a price tag on.

If you’re spending 15 minutes a day on your brows (and in my experience most people guess low), that’s:

Weekly: 1 hour 45 minutes
Monthly: 7.6 hours
Yearly: 90+ hours
Over 5 years: 450+ hours

That’s 450 hours of standing in front of a mirror, trying to make two siblings look like twins. Every. Single. Day.

And I hear the same story from clients over and over: a pencil kept in the car so they can draw their brows on at red lights on the way to work, then the whole thing redone by midday because it smudged and never matched.

Now add in the check-ins throughout the day, the touch-ups after the gym, the removal every night, the shopping trips, the tutorial watching. By my full tally, the real total is closer to 162 hours per year.

What would you do with about 157 of those hours back every year?

Sleep in. Read. Work out. Spend time with your family. Start something new. Or just enjoy not thinking about your brows for the first time in years.

That’s what microblading actually gives you: those hours back, year after year.

Why the Lowest Price Can Cost You the Most

I need to talk about this because I see it in my chair.

Someone finds a deal — a $200 session, a flash sale, a coupon. They think they’re being smart with their money. And then some of them end up in my chair months later, asking me to fix it.

I want to be specific about this, because “corrections cost more” sounds like a sales line until you’ve sat across from the person living it. The clients who come to me for a fix almost always have the same story: they found a deal, the result looked fine for a few weeks, and then it healed wrong—a stroke that blurred into a smudge, a color that went warm-orange or ashy-gray, a tail that sat a half-centimeter too high so one brow reads “surprised” all day. By the time they’re in my chair, the bargain didn’t save them anything. They paid the bargain price and they’re now paying me to undo it—and sometimes paying for laser sessions first to lighten old pigment enough that I can build natural strokes over it. The “deal” became the most expensive route to the brows they wanted.

Getting it fixed costs more than getting it right the first time — not because I charge more to correct someone else’s work (I don’t), but because by then you’ve paid twice, and sometimes three times, plus the months of waiting in between.

That’s the math people miss. The comparison that matters is $650 done once against $200 plus a correction plus the months of looking in the mirror and not feeling like yourself. I price for the version where you don’t have to do this twice.

Price alone won’t tell you who’s good. Plenty of talented newer artists charge less while they build a portfolio. Whoever you’re considering, these are the questions I’d ask:

Ask to see brows at 4-6 weeks, not only on the day. Photos on the day show you the shape; photos a few weeks later show you how the color and strokes settled.

Ask how many sessions they’ve done. There’s a learning curve to this work. I didn’t become confident in my results overnight. It took thousands of brows.

Ask what the touch-up costs and how long it is. The SPCP’s own guidance is that at least one follow-up to the initial procedure should be scheduled, so get that number up front: a $300 quote with a $150 touch-up is a $450 quote. Then ask how long the appointment runs. A full corrective session and a 20-minute tidy-up are not the same thing.

Trust your gut. If the consultation feels rushed, if they can’t answer your questions, if their workspace doesn’t feel clean—walk away. Your face is not the place to bargain hunt.

What the Real Five-Year Investment Actually Looks Like

Most pricing articles make microblading sound like a bottomless subscription—a forever expense that keeps draining your wallet year after year. After 10+ years and 3,500+ brows, I can tell you the honest picture is a lot calmer than that, so let me walk you through it the way I’d explain it to a friend.

It’s front-loaded—the biggest payment comes first

Year one is two known numbers and no third one: $650 for the first session, with the deposit that holds your spot counting toward that total, and $150 for the required touch-up at 6-8 weeks. I spell out both before anything starts, whether you come in for a consultation first or book the session directly, so nothing shows up later that you didn’t already plan for. That’s year one done at $800 total. After that, it’s $300 at a time, and only when you decide your brows have softened enough that you want them back. That’s the opposite of a subscription.

The truth about the “annual refresher”

You’ll see studios claim “90% of clients come back every year.” That number is fiction—it counts the required 6-8 week touch-up (the second half of your first-year process, not a yearly return) as if it were one. Realistically, only about a third of clients come back for a yearly refresher. The rest stretch it to 18 months, two years, sometimes longer—because hyper-realistic, semi-permanent pigment fades slowly and gracefully. There’s no harsh cutoff where your brows suddenly look bad. They just get a little softer over time, and you come back when YOU feel ready, not on a fixed yearly schedule.

I’d rather lose the sale than overstate that. If an artist tells you you’ll be back every single year like clockwork, ask them to show you the actual pattern.

So what’s the real five-year picture?

Here it is on my menu. Year one is $800, and each refresher after that is $300.

Over five years, that’s $1,400-2,000, depending on how often you come back: roughly $280-400 a year. My product tally runs $207-379 a year. So the five-year average lands in the same range as the products you’d keep buying, not below them, and I won’t sell microblading to you as a way to save money on pencils.

For about what you were already spending on the routine, the routine itself goes away, and the largest outlay is behind you by the end of year one.

That front-loaded math is the whole case I’d make for microblading.

What Makes Pricing Vary Between Artists?

Experience level, what the quoted number actually covers (consultation, aftercare kit, and how the required touch-up is priced), pigment, the studio itself, and whether the artist specializes in brows or does everything.

The SPCP’s published average for a permanent cosmetic procedure is $400-$800, and the same page is blunt about how to weigh it: “The cost of the procedure should not be the most important issue when consulting a potential permanent cosmetic professional. Most important is the training and skill of the person performing the procedure” (SPCP, Public Information). The differences come down to these:

Experience Level

Experience is most of what you’re paying for, and it shows in how brows heal. 10+ years and more than 3,500 treatments of doing this one thing means I’ve seen every skin type, every face shape, and nearly every way a brow can heal.

What the Number Actually Covers

Before you compare two quotes, ask what each one covers: the consultation, the aftercare kit, the touch-up, and color correction if it’s needed.

My consultation is free, the aftercare kit comes with your session, and my two numbers are the only two numbers: $650 for the first session and $150 for the required touch-up at 6-8 weeks. $800 total for year one, and you know both figures before you book.

Tools and Pigments

This is the part you can’t see until it’s on your face and healed. I mix pigment for the color it settles to weeks later, not the color it shows on the day, and the manual tool I use is disposable: opened for you, thrown away after.

The Studio

In Illinois, microblading is regulated as body art by the Illinois Department of Public Health, and the registration belongs to the location: in IDPH’s words, “The location holds the Body Art permit with IDPH, not the individual.” My studio holds that body art permit. Whoever you’re considering, ask where they work and whether that location is registered.

Specialization

I do brows and nothing else. No lash extensions, no facials, no microblading squeezed in between other services. That focus is part of what the price pays for.

Sarah Delaney smiling against a white background, holding up a slim handheld tool and pointing to it — Every manual tool I use is opened for one client and thrown away after her appointment.

The Real ROI: What You Actually Get Back

Let’s move past the spreadsheet for a second, because most of what this investment gives back never shows up on it.

Time You’ll Never Get Back

162 hours a year, by my tally, and that’s the big one. Those hours cover the minutes in front of the mirror, and the routine takes up mental bandwidth as well: the decision fatigue, and the “do my brows look okay?” loop that plays on repeat all day.

After microblading, that loop stops. You wake up. Your brows are done. You move on with your life.

Products You Stop Buying

Once your brows have healed, the pencils, powders, pomades and gels can go. Some clients keep a clear brow gel for extra polish on special occasions, and that’s it.

What you stop spending: $207-379 a year, by my tally — which is exactly why the refresher and the products come out close on money, and why the real difference is time.

Confidence That’s Hard to Quantify

This is the one that’s tough to put a dollar amount on, and it’s the one I hear about afterward.

Not wondering if your brows look even during a meeting. Not checking your phone camera every time you leave a bathroom. Not skipping the pool because you don’t want to deal with your brows afterward.

Clients tell me they feel more confident barefaced than they ever did with full makeup, because their brows frame their face without any effort from them.

The Morning You Get Back

Kimberly M., who over-plucked as a teen and lived with patchy brows for years, put it better than I can in her Google review: “I’m so glad I got my eyebrows done and now don’t have to worry about drawing them on every time I want to leave the house!” Your alarm goes off, you wash your face, and the brows you used to draw on are already there.

That’s what the investment actually buys you.

How to Budget for Microblading

If the price feels like a lot upfront, here are some practical ways to make it work:

Do the Product Audit First

Go through your bathroom and add up what you spend on brow products in a year. If it’s $25-30 a month, that’s $300-360 a year. After year one, a $300 refresher every 12-18 months works out to $200-300 a year, a little under that. If you want to see the exact breakdown for your situation, try my Microblading Cost Calculator.

Plan Ahead

If you know you want microblading, put your brow-product money aside instead of restocking. It won’t cover the first session on its own, but you’ll find out exactly what the routine was costing you.

Think Per-Day Cost

$800 for year one, spread across the 12-18 months your brows last before you’d want a refresher, is about $1.46-2.19 a day. For brows that are done before you even open your eyes.

Ask About Payment Plans

I offer payment plans. Bring it up during your consultation and I’ll work out what fits.

Factor In What You Stop Spending

The $207-379 a year my tally puts on brow products is money you stop spending once you’ve healed, so the real net investment is lower than the menu price.

So… Is It Worth It?

For most people who are tired of drawing their brows on, yes. Over five years, microblading lands in the same range as the brow products you’d otherwise keep buying, and it hands back about 157 of the 162 hours a year the routine takes.

When someone hesitates on the price, in my experience it’s because they aren’t sure yet about the result, and that’s exactly what a consultation is for.

I’m not going to tell you microblading is right for everyone. It’s not. Some people genuinely enjoy their brow routine. Some people are on medications that affect microblading and need to sort that out with their doctor first. Some people aren’t ready for the commitment. That’s all completely valid.

But if you’re here—if you Googled “is microblading worth the cost” at 11pm because you’re tired of the same morning routine—I think you already know your answer.

I’d suggest you check if you’re a good candidate first. Then read about what microblading actually involves so you know exactly what you’re signing up for. And if you’re weighing the price against a traditional eyebrow tattoo, read why microblading is the better investment over time—ink built to stay can carry the lower price upfront and the higher one once it shifts color. No surprises.

Ready to go? Book your first session directly. Still deciding? Book a free consultation. I’ll look at your brows, answer every question you have, and give you my honest opinion on whether microblading makes sense for you. No pressure, no obligation.

Because I treat your face like it’s my own. And I’d want someone to be straight with me.

Serving the Southwestern Suburbs

My studio is in Shorewood, IL, and I work with clients from across the Chicago southwestern suburbs. Whether you’re coming from Aurora, Bolingbrook, Downers Grove, or right here in Shorewood, you get the same appointment in the same chair, from someone who does brows and nothing else. Over 3,500 treatments and counting.

Sources

Society of Permanent Cosmetic Professionals, Public Information — the $400-$800 average per procedure, $150 to $250 an hour for advanced work, at least one follow-up after the initial procedure, and the line on training and skill mattering more than price. Read October 10, 2026.
Illinois Department of Public Health, Body Art Establishments — microblading regulated as body art, and the permit held by the location, not the individual. Read October 10, 2026.
My own menu, as it stands on my booking calendar: $650 first session, $150 touch-up, $300 refresher, free consultation — see pricing.
My own tally of brow-product spend and routine time, item by item — see 5 Minutes a Day = 30+ Hours a Year on Your Eyebrows.
My own experience across 3,500+ treatments in 10+ years: the refresher pattern, the correction clients, and the stories clients tell me about their mornings.

Have questions about pricing or want to talk through whether microblading is the right investment for you? Contact me — I answer every message personally.