Probably the scariest part of doing your makeup (after curling your eyelashes!) is doing your eyeliner. It’s a daunting task. You have to make sure that the lines are straight and bold enough to be visible–but not so much that you look like a panda. Add winged eyeliner to the equation and you’ve got yourself a nightmare. The biggest problem with liquid eyeliner is that it can smudge very easily, or get on other parts of your eyelids if you open your eye before it dries. Here are some things to consider when applying liquid eyeliner.
1. Type of eyeliner
The kind of eyeliner you choose makes a huge difference. This is the same as choosing the right brush for your eyeliner. There are some eyeliners that come with really thick brushes which might make it easier and faster for you to apply eyeliner, but only if you’re already a pro. So if you’re a beginner, stick to a really thin-tipped eyeliner. That way, keeping your eyeliner even becomes easier and a little mishap won’t be that big of a deal.
2. Method of application
The way you hold your brush to apply eyeliner makes a lot of difference. A common mistake is to hold the liner like a pen and try to draw along the line. This makes your hand shake and if you’re not used to eyeliner, especially the liquid kind, you will end up drawing really crooked and shaky lines. A better way to hold the eyeliner is to hold it between your index finger and thumb, and use the other three fingers, especially the pinky, to support your hand. Place the other three fingers on your cheekbone, right under your eye and you can simply move your index and thumb and draw a straight line.
3. Patience
As terrible as it sounds, you need to have a lot of patience when you’re putting on liquid eyeliner. It does take a little while to dry, but I promise you, it’s worth the wait. This also means that if you’re planning to put on liquid eyeliner, you need to devote more time to this than you would if you were using a pencil. One thing I do when I’m running late is open my eye halfway, just enough to see myself in the mirror, so that I can do the other eye while the first one dries. If you feel like that’s too much of a hassle, put on lipstick in the meantime.
4. Winged eyeliner
Here’s a bonus tip. Getting your wings perfect is a very hard thing to do, so here’s a very easy way to not only get wings that look fierce AF, but also match perfectly.
While we’re at it, I’ll let you in on a little secret: No one’s wings are perfectly even. Every wing is unique in its own way. You just have to make sure that they look even.