I LOATHE MY SCARY DAD BUT I LOVE MY BLACK EYES: My 3 Favorite Liners Of All Time
I may look sullen in this photo, but I think I’m just fixated on my perfectly smudged upper lash line. Or, on my wacked childhood! Couldn’t say…Originally written by Cat Marnell, September 28, 2011
Posted in Beauty, abuse, blame dad, eyeliner, family drama, shoppables
Anyway. Eyeliner.
So basically I wasn’t allowed to wear makeup in junior high when all of my friends were. Certainly there are worse rules that can be imposed by a father on a 12-year-old girl, including but not limited to, say, “It is Thursday and you must bone me now.”
(I suffered no sexual abuse as a young person.)
But for me the no-makeup rule was the worst possible thing -- and from day one, all I wanted was to be allowed to wear HOT.BLACK. EYELINER. I had behind me an entire young childhood of wanting and wanting and wanting positive attention, and getting none.
(…except occasionally from a few odd Estonian live-in nannies, my grandmother Mimi and on special days like Christmas, or whenever my brother and sister and I feigned obligatory intimacy by awkwardly hugging our dad after we’d opened presents.)
Ah, youth. I stayed holed up in my room in a D.C. stone and glass Frank Lloyd Wright monstrosity (now a synagogue, God bless) far away from my controlling, unpredictable, terrifying, raging mental ward-psychiatrist dad (and, by default, from my absentee mother, who was then too afraid to divorce and understandably never home) and his evening home office on the other side of the giant house.
And for once, I wasn't lonely being alone. I’d discovered rock stars and fashion magazines -- and, through them, that I could get all the attention I wanted from other people just by being provocative-looking.
It was the beginning of heroin chic and by seventh grade I was 85 pounds tops and I’d nailed the whole “LOOK AT ME! I’M A WAIF!” thing: black boots, cut-off Levis, wife beater, smirky countenance on the Metro (where I was once -- a year before I got my period -- offered $300 for sex), no boobs, no bra.
All that was missing was the eyeliner (it wasn’t a great time for lipstick -- nudes were big, and Bobbi Brown was new). And oh, how I wanted to badly to be age-inappropriate and smoldering in the face, like Kate Moss or a baby Shirley Manson (I was then a brunette, since I obviously couldn't dye my hair):
So for a bit I did the obvious thing and just started buying drugstore liners on my own, applying them at school, and washing off the evidence before I got home. Eventually, though -- like a cross dresser with mascara traces -- I was caught. My sister ratted me out! Obvs. We’re way tight now.
Anyway, as punishment I was surely screamed at, only possibly pinched until my eyes teared or shook by the shoulders or kicked in the legs – all of his rages blur together now; he was certainly not always physical with me, though my sister had it worse -- and I was grounded for at least a month, not that any Marnell child was allowed to go anywhere anyway, ever.
My dad, though rarely home, was a control freak, you see. And he could only control what happened in his beautiful, miserable house -- with abusive behavior, and with obsessively enforced rules.
And THEN. One morning the nanny told me that my father had made my mother -- who was kind but pathologically spineless and just as much a prisoner under her now ex-husband’s proverbial Iron Curtain -- call the school and convince them somehow to have me check in to the vice principal’s office twice a day and be examined for traces of makeup by A SCHOOL NURSE!
As though I was constantly suspected of being covered in HEAD LICE. The indignity, at age 12 and 13!
And that day, that’s exactly what happened! I was paged via intercom to report to the nurse’s office for inspection, every day. THIS WENT ON FOR FOUR MONTHS AND EVEN RESUMED WHEN I STARTED EIGHTH GRADE.
Keep in mind, this was a super-nice, laid-back, liberal middle school full of healthy, well-off D.C. kids. I was popular and well behaved and played sports and dressed basically like a boy. And the other girls wore "starter" makeup!
THE INSPECTION THING WAS SO. CRAZY.
If you think I’m making this up -- that no parent would cajole school authorities into checking their kid for traces of eyeliner -- wait until I tell you in another post one day what happened to my big sister the first time she tried pot at 14.
(SNEAK PREVIEW: She was sent to a"troubled teens" manor in Utah for 15 months, where she was made to stand in her underpants in front of a class full of ex-prostitutes and teen gang bangers, and weep as she confessed to all her past bad deeds and begged them to please, please believe her; that she wanted to change.
YUP.)
I myself left home at 14. Unlike Emily, however, I wasn’t kidnapped in the middle of the night by two burly men and forced into a van, handcuffed, screaming and confused, that took me to Dulles airport, then to Vegas (the handcuffs finally came off on the plane), and then finally to the clink Utah.
No, I went to a nice prep school in Massachusetts, where I wore all the eyeliner I wanted until I got kicked out for drugs senior year and moved to New York, where I wore even MORE eyeliner, and started interning in magazines, and became an editor, and had a nervous breakdown, and went to bed for a year, and returned to the world, still wearing eyeliner, to half-function as the beauty director of this very website that you’re reading today. See? Happy ending! I mean it, too.
So my point is …. EYELINER: I fucking live for it! Here are three of my all-time favorites.
1) BARE MINERALS BUXOM INSIDER EYELINER
This is meant for the slimy inner rims of your eye, plus the tricky lower lashline. It’s velvety, inky-dark and ultra skinny, plus soft. It won’t scratch your eyeball or anything spooky like that, or tug at your skin and give you gnarly undereye wrinkles.
Also it is all-natural – no parabens and junk like that – which I imagine is crucial when you are poking things in your eye socket just so.
Applying liner to the bottom lash line is hard, but there’s this thing called the credit card trick that I always see makeup artists do. I’m too lazy to explain it, so watch this video here. But first finish reading MY article. And leave me a sexy comment, and then you can go watch the video.
Oh, and allegedly it’s formulated with vitamins and things to, I guess, seep into your eyeball slime and fortify you. It’s a highly scientific process called wildly imaginative beauty copywriting. I mean, I don’t doubt that the vitamins are vaguely there, but it’s not like eyeliner vitamins are going to do anything. Don’t quit eating your Flintstones.
2) MAC LIQUID LAST LINER
This stuff is NOT for amateurs, but the thing with not-for-amateurs makeup is that you have to screw it up and try to use it about six million times before you start to get it right.
So why use a difficult product in the first place? Because the formula is the best of the best of the best: It’s the BLACKEST-black liquid liner, and it stays the same dark-wet color even after it dries. And then, it never comes off unless you FORCE it off.
I mean, I’ve put a stripe of this on my hand to get the initial gob off the end of the brush applicator once – and then I took a shower, and that night I took a bath, and the next day I took a bath again, and the line was STILL THERE.
Just think of all the possibilities for such an unbudgeable product, my dears! Unlimited consensual hate sex, and you’ll look flawless in the eyes after.
One trick is to use a tiny brush and dab some of the liquid from the brush, then apply. I find that tedious and lacking in the dramatic flair of a thicker, messier-but-so-what line, so I just dab the brush on a piece of toilet paper first, then eye-line away with abandon.
3) PRESTIGE COSMETICS TOTAL INTENSITY EYELINER IN BLACKEST BLACK
I love this brand, Prestige, for eye makeup. This pencil is $5.50 and it is crazy-awesome. I discovered it buying makeup on whim at a junky chain of drugstores called Duane Reade here in New York, and have been using it ever since even though I get like nine million free ones from all the other brands.
OK, I’ll get back to the Prestige in a second, but I want to say one thing about pencils in general: With the exception of like 10 brands (a lot of them high-end, surprisingly enough!), you can’t go wrong with picking a black eyeliner pencil. As my old boss at Lucky used to say, “They’re ALL made in the same factory in Germany.”
In my opinion, the trick is KEEPING THEM SHARPENED. That keeps this Prestige one perfect in my bathroom: it goes on in a beautiful dark, crisp line that I can smudge out to smoky as I so choose, and the whole effect stays put.
So there you go! What are YOUR favorite black eyeliners?