Because we haven’t talked about eyeliner in a week or so

You know what this blog doesn’t have enough of? Talk of eyeliner! Okay, yes it does, but some things have changed in my eyeliner game and I’m no longer recommending what I recommended for years, so I thought an update was in order.

Long-time readers will remember that my eyeliner jam used to be M.A.C.’s PowerPoint eyeliner in Engraved. While Engraved wasn’t as black as M.A.C.’s kohl liner, Smolder, it went on smoothly and didn’t budge (Smolder tended to make its way to the middle of my eyelid, which was not super cute.)

Unfortunately, being a town where there’s no mall (and thus no M.A.C. counter) made it difficult to pick up a replacement when my eyeliner ran out. And of course, M.A.C. isn’t sold at Sephora, so if I wanted to buy online, I had to go through M.A.C. directly and pay for shipping, which: No.

So, I began using Revlon ColorStay Liquid Eye Pen and found I really liked it. It was great for a cat eye, it wore well, it came off easily when needed, and it was cheap. And I could get it at Target.

But, I am always a sucker for non-drugstore makeup, so when I read a review for Benefit’s They’re Real Push-Up Liner in my Allure magazine, I knew I had to try it. I tried it and immediately liked the staying power, although removing it was a challenge, especially because I try to use as little eye makeup remover as possible to minimize irritation–contact lens wearers holla!

My problem was the liner only works well only when it works well. Here’s the deal: To get the liner out of the pen, you twist the bottom a few times. Then you wait. And wait. And wait some more, until the (liquid-ish) liner pops out the top of the pen. Unfortunately, all the twisting on the bottom of the pen didn’t really work until sometime long after I’d applied the eyeliner. So, cut to the next morning, when a bunch of eyeliner was popping out of the top. And because it would have been sitting for 24 hours or so, the eyeliner would be hard and unusable. It felt wasteful to me, to just get rid of this chunk of eyeliner each day.

Behold:

Just the tip.

So, in need of a new eyeliner, it was back to the Revlon I went. We’ve been happy ever since. Until I find the next thing I just have to try, of course.