I’ve been going through a short phase of wearing very little eye makeup. It’s an age-related thing: once my giant winged liner stopped looking how I wanted it to due to eyelid droop and general crepiness, I swerved liner altogether. I know there are lots of ways of making it work on what we must call The Older Eye, but those ways weren’t for me, I thought. It’s funny how you get fixated on “your” look — once I’d established the flicky liner no longer worked, I banished all liners and just stuck to mascara. I’ve never liked liner all around the eye, top and bottom. It looks wonderful on lots of people but on me it looks incredibly basic, harsh, unless I smudge it to oblivion, and not especially flattering.
But then about a month ago my eyes started annoying me. They looked all lost and small. There isn’t another facial feature that I am particularly keen to emphasize — if you’re going to draw deliberate attention to something, it really might as well be your eyes. I have a vast collection of eye pencils — I mean vast — and I got them all out and started playing with them. The solution to my eye problem presented itself immediately: draw a wing, but start it in the center of the eye, not at the inner corner.
Make sure it goes right up at the temple end, thereby giving a lifting effect. Apply it in powder form first, and then go over the line with a budge-proof pencil; smudge if you want it smudged (I don’t, generally). You can do this with a liquid liner if you want, but for everyday I prefer a pencil. The question is, which pencil? It needs to be really dense and dark, it needs to be slim enough to draw a neat line, it needs to be as soft as butter so as not to drag along crinkly eyelid skin, and most to the point it needs to stay absolutely put.
It needs to be as soft as butter so as not to drag along crinkly eyelid skin.
I love and have always loved Hourglass Voyeur Waterproof Gel Liner ($28), which comes in particularly luscious colors and does not budge, but the nib is quite fat. I love, love, love Victoria Beckham Beauty Satin Kajal Liner ($32), which is ultra-blendable and ultra-flattering (there’s a really beautiful newish color called Cinnamon that I strongly recommend), but I wanted something very dark and dense and what I love about the VBBs is their incomparable jewel tones.
Then my eye alighted on a Suqqu Gel Eyeliner Pencil ($27), an innocuous looking little thing that was just sitting there untested. Well. It’s perfect. It is ultra-soft and creamy to apply, but has such a minute little nib that you can be extremely precise and graphic if you want to be. If quite a stark line isn’t for you, there’s a smudger on the other end, but for me the starkness is the point. It’s a very good black — black, but not too black, if you see what I mean, ultra-black being too graphic for my purposes (and aging situation). It’s waterproof and once it sets it doesn’t move. There are millions of gel liners out there, and I’m not saying they’re not any cop — most of them are more than serviceable, though finding the sweet spot between buttery and long-lasting isn’t always a cinch. For a clean, defined line, though, this one is perfection.
India Knight is a U.K.-based journalist and the author of India Knight’s Beauty Edit: What Works When You’re Older
