May Your Coffee Be Hot and The Wings of Your Eyeliner Be Even
By: Erin Broussard
Ok, so all I see these days are hacks. There seems to be a hack for everything! We’ve figured out ways to shortcut or cheat pretty much anything. Some of them are genius while some are more trouble than they should be. And some of them are simply showing us what we’ve been doing wrong for years and even though the “right” way is revealed to us we sometimes still continue to do it the way we always did.
Which brings me to my point.
Makeup hacks. Specifically winged eyeliner. The classic cat eye. It’s timeless and can be dramatic or subtle depending on your mood, your outfit or the company you’ll be with. But it takes work to perfect it.
As a teenager, I hadn’t adopted the look just yet. No, I opted for maroon shimmer eye shadow that went all the way to my brow and some of the purple dust remnants would sometimes land on random parts of my face making myself looked a little roughed up or bruised which of course had to be wiped off resulting in having to redo my face powder. Right now you’re thinking “oh wow” and trying to picture the image. Looking at old pics I guess I somehow pulled it off but thinking back on it I cringe.
It wasn’t until I moved to Los Angeles that I fell in love with the classic cat eye. Most of the girls I hung with wore a cat eye almost daily and had super pale white skin…and they taught me how to do both.
They taught me which sunscreen to wear and where to put it. They taught me about big floppy hats and giant sunglasses and wearing a glove and sleeve while driving to shield that driving arm from the harsh California rays. Yes, I literally kept a glove and a long sleeve in the car at all times. I know it sounds ridiculous but it all seemed pretty normal to me. I still do these things. Religiously.
When it came to eyeliner, this took me a little bit to get good at. My friends told me to just keep practicing. They couldn’t do it for me. I had to learn! Which means I had to PRACTICE AND PRACTICE AND PRACTICE! Because, dear god, that winged point had better be sharp looking enough to stab someone! None of this flat or rounded tip of the liner. Oh and be even with the other eye too!
I had to work at it. Everyone I knew who rocked that look also had to work at it. It took tons of practice to get it right before you ventured out in public. There were many times you’d think, “I’ll just do a thin little wing…aaaaand I’m Amy Winehouse.” You also had to remind yourself that you must remain cool, calm and collected when using a liquid liner as she can sense fear making it impossible to achieve a straight line. Point being that I had many, many disasters with no shortcut!
Which is why I’m not sure how I feel about these eyeliner hacks. A few months ago I watched with my mouth wide open as different women demonstrated some of these hacks. Holy Shit. I was dying! Dead. Deceased. LOLOLOL!
One woman used tape to make a sharp edge and by doing this pulled off her face makeup when pulling off the tape. Another used a bobby pin to draw a triangle and then color it in. A plastic spoon was another woman’s tool used to trace a line on her eyelid and my favorite was a tooth-picker dental floss thingy covered with a liquid liner and then stamped on the edge of the eyelid too, I guess, create a straight line and point which she then filled in.
Do I wish I would have known some of these hacks a long time ago? Do I say to myself, “man, why didn’t anyone show me this before?” I’m gonna have to say no and no since I really, seriously don’t think anyone I knew was using any of them. And if they were they sure kept a hilarious secret that is now out in the open. I’m all about doing what you gotta do to get what you need sometimes but I think I’d be too embarrassed in front of myself using some of these “hacks”! Or worse…one of them could actually be my technique!