Fuck me, Mark Antony: THIS IS A LIQUID EYELINER POST
Guys, I’ve been thinking long and hard about how to write this liquid eyeliner post, and it’s sort of a baffler. Because the thing is, I fuck up my eyeliner every time I do it. That’s why it always ends up so thick: I get a perfect swooping cat’s-eye on one eye, then I go to replicate it on the other eye and it ends up just a little bit thicker than the first. So I go back and make the first one just a little bit thicker, but now that one’s just a little bit thicker than the other. And so on, ad infinitum, until I resemble a raccoon. Which, while cute, are not particularly known for their fuck-me eyes. And the purpose of even bothering with such a damnable thing as liquid eyeliner in the first place has got to be the creation of the perfect fuck-me eyes, no?
So anyway. On with the show. I use multiple products to create my winged (please pronounce that with two syllables) Cleopatra eyes. First, prep: because I put on a fairly heavy-slime eye moisturizer (Clinique All About Eyes Rich, if you’re wondering) every day after I wash my face, if I were to attempt the eyeliner right on top of that, it would smear everywhere and be halfway up to my eyebrows ten minutes after application. (Which is a look, but not the one we’re going for today.) So I use a very small amount of lid primer to mattify my eyelids. (In keeping with the previous “when to splurge” post, this is probably a product you don’t have to pay a lot of money for; I just got a free sample from Sephora and happen to like it.) Three tiny dots spaced evenly, very close to the lash line, and blended lightly upwards, should do it.
Oh, rewind a bit: when I’m really going serious with the liquid eyeliner, it’s the very first item of makeup I put on my face. That’s because I’m going to need to rest my hands on my face (I know, ick) for balance and precision, so if I’m already wearing makeup, I don’t want to rub it off. If I’m in a hurry and or I’ve decided on liquid eyeliner late in the game, though, it’s not a huge deal; I just get real close and use the mirror for stability instead.
Next, upper waterline prep. This is a crucial step that I think a lot of people skip; it makes a huge difference. Take a good, smudgy, smooth-gliding eye pencil (I use this in “Zero,” but I see they have a new color, called “Perversion,” described as “matte blackest black,” and I’m intrigued) and run it through the base of your upper lashes. Basically you’re coloring in the spaces between your lashes as well as the inner rim of your upper eyelid. Just go ahead and smush it in there at the base of the lashes. (I love this trick so much — because it makes you look like you have about three times the amount of eyelashes you actually do — that I’ll sometimes use it on just regular days, too.) If your hand gets a little shaky and some of the eyeliner goes above your eyelashes, just smudge it until it gets smoky. It’ll get covered with liquid eyeliner anyway.
Another note: if you are restricting your eyeliner to top lids only (because it’s daytime, say, or because it makes your eyes look bigger that way), just be aware that the upper waterline eye pencil will smudge down onto your lower eyelash rims the first couple times you blink; be ready with a Q-tip to wipe away the smudges. If you’re going whole hog (because it’s nighttime, or because you are Kate Middleton) and doing the lower lids too (with pencil! Not liquid!), let that stuff smudge all it wants.
Okay, here’s where it gets tricky. I use this felt pen eyeliner (in “Trooper”) for the actual cat’s-eye. I used to use the true paintbrush liquid stuff, and I still will if I have to, but the felt pen dries faster (so if you blink in the middle of the application, it doesn’t rubber-stamp your eyelid) and stays put longer, I’ve found.
The most important tip I’ve heard about eyeliner, I think, is that you’re not lining your eye. That is, you’re not outlining the actual contour of your eye; you’re drawing a much different shape than your actual eye shape around your eye, and then you’re filling it in.
Start thin and stay close to the lashes at the inner corner, but start deviating from the lash line almost immediately. The line should thicken as you move outwards from your inner eye, but you don’t have to worry about that yet; you can fill in the gap later; right now, focus on drawing the top line, which will run as a parallel but exaggerated (dare I say prettier?) version of your actual eye shape. When you’ve gone three-quarters of the way to the end of your eye (and here I mean end of your eyelashes), STOP. Now start in from the other side (ie, the outside corner of your eye, working in). Choose the point you want your eyeliner to extend to — how high, how far out from your eye — and make a dot there. In my experience, I usually pick a spot that’s too conservative, connect the lines, and then realize I’ve barely got a Jackie eye, much less a Marilyn. So go big. Once you’ve got that dot, connect it, with an upward swoop, to the line you’ve already got coming in the other direction. (This part I’m finding as hard to describe as it was to master. Haha. “Master.” Like I said, I mess it up almost every time. Practice when you’re bored!) Now, fill in the empty space between your lashes and the line you’ve drawn. Make a nice up-curving sweep between the outside corner of your eye and the end of the line.
Now, repeat this exactly on the other eye. Haha! It’s funny because it’s impossible. Maybe it’s easier to achieve when you’re doing it on another person, but let’s just accept that this part (the evening-up) is a bitch. Here, the trick is to know when to stop. A good rule of thumb: CLOSE ENOUGH. Any disparities between your eyes will be less noticeable once you put on your mascara. They’re also way more visible to you than to anyone else. Another tip: you can even things up by subtracting instead of adding, which is, again, where the Q-tip (this time, dipped in eye-makeup remover) comes in handy.
Now. My mascara regimen is so complicated it’s going to get its own post, but needless to say, the next step is very heavy mascara, concentrated especially on the outer lashes, where you will pull the brush sideways so as to get your lashes mimicking the shape of your eyeliner as best they can.
And, like I mentioned before, you can either choose to leave your lower eyeline bare or you can use the same glidey eye pencil you used before to fill in your bottom lashes. Again, thicker towards the outside of the eye. Truly big nights out get the bottom waterline all done up in black, too. Just smudge it everywhere. You can’t really go wrong. (Warning: the opinions of others may differ.) I think, in the end, pulling off really heavy liquid eyeliner is all about your attitude when you wear it: you can either be afraid you look like a raccoon (you do; that’s okay), or you can imagine yourself as Cleopatra on the river Cydnus, shooting that very first fuck-me look at Mark Antony from her purple-sailed perfumed barge.
(Final note: as an English major who wrote my thesis on A&C, I feel compelled to reassure you that I know Shakespeare’s version has Cleopatra and Antony making first eye contact not from barge-to-shore but at a feast later that night. But I imagine she was shooting fuck-me looks left and right all the way down the river, in preparation.)
