A tale of the crooked winged liner

 If you squint your eyes and tilt your head it kind of looks ok!

For as long as I can remember I have envied anyone who can do a winged eyeliner. Mostly because it looks fabulous of course but more so because I can’t do it! Doesn’t matter how many tutorials I watch, carefully studying all the tricks to do the ‘perfect winged liner’, unfortunately it turns out one way. I’ll describe it to you: I start by thinking ‘this is going ok’, it goes a bit crooked so I try to fix it and then I fix some more and by the time I’ve finished fixing it, I have so much eyeliner on it could easily be mistaken for black eyeshadow! So much so that I look like I have been punched in the eye and it takes me a week to remove it. You can see why I don’t do this look very often.

There has been one major thing missing in my attempts to do the perfect winged liner; an angled brush. I don’t know how I thought I was going to achieve this look without it, so I finally got myself one. Before I spent a month’s wage on a makeup brush (ok slight exaggeration but they can be expensive!) I thought I would purchase a standard, no fuss art brush first. I already had a MAC Fluidline gel liner in the shade Blacktrack and with the help of some tricks learnt from all the tutorials I’ve watched, here is my first attempt.

I was actually surprised at how well it went. I was expecting it to take me hours to do but I got this done in no time. I’ll be the first to point out my two eyes don’t match and it is rather messy but for a first attempt I’m pretty happy. The thing that really helped me was a tip I got from Lisa Eldridge. I marked out the flick with a dark grey eyeshadow first so if I didn’t get the shape right it was easy to take off. Once that was done I went in with the gel liner. This is where it got a bit tricky but with a bit more practise (a lot more perhaps?), I think this may become a regular fixture in my makeup routine. It really is about practise and getting to feel the brush in your hand. I may have been aiming too high with the gel liner so I think for the next little while I will stick with a shadow flick.

xo