Day 9 - How I Do My Winged Eyeliner

Winged eyeliner can be a real pain sometimes, let’s be honest it’s a miracle if you can get it even on both eyes and then sometimes your hand slips and you get black everywhere and then you have to find your stash of makeup wipes and makeup remover to fix the problem and ugh. So much drama. But I still persevere, because I LOVE winged liner, I love the way it looks and how there are so many different options when it comes to eyeliner, and so I’m going to attempt to show you how I do my liner. I will admit, since I have bad eyesight I do sometimes find eyeliner a struggle, my sight in my right eye is considerably worse than my left eye and so sometimes I find it hard to see where I need to draw the line, so bear with me.

I do winged liner pretty much every day, and find the easiest way to do it is to use a felt pen style liquid liner, there are of course plenty of other eyeliner options (kohl, pencil, gel) and really it just depends on what kind of look you want to achieve and which product you would feel the most comfortable using. I like using a pen style liquid liner because I find it easier to grip and find that (if you do it right) you’re left with a very neat eyeliner look.

The first thing I like to do is pop on a base or some eyeshadow, I find that a background to your eyeliner can really make it stand out and make it last longer. I like to create a simple neutral smokey eye by using very natural eyeshadows. I create a light base, add a lighter brown to add some definition and then put a darker brown or shimmery colour in the crease.

Now you can obviously do your liner in whichever order you feel comfortable, but I’m strange and like to draw the wing before I draw the line because I find that if you do mess up you can then just wipe away the wing and not have to remove a lot of eyeliner. So first I take my eyeliner pen and draw a small, thin line on both eyes that wing out towards the end of my eyebrow (the length that you draw the line really depends on how you want your eyeliner to look).

Next I position my liner about ¼ of the way down from the top of the line and bring it back down to create the wing. Okay, I apologise, I’m terrible at describing things, you just need to create a triangular shape for your wing, and you’ll see what I mean from the photos. Just wing it (see what I did there?). Anyway, you then need to fill in the wing.

Now take the liner and starting at the edge of the wing (or wherever feels comfortable) line your eye, trying to make the line thinner near the inner corner of your eye and thicker near the wing. Then fill in any white gaps in your line.

Finally you can take some gel eyeliner or black eyeshadow on a small brush and use it to set your line in place. That’s it! You’re done! I’m aware that I made it sound simple when mastering winged eyeliner could very well have been one of the 12 labours of Hercules, but it really isn’t that hard to do, you just need to practise. I don’t have a lot of time to get ready in a morning and it really only takes me a couple of minutes to do both wings (that is if I don’t mess them up).

I hope that this has been at least partially helpful, and really doing winged liner is just about practice. I’m not brilliant at eyeliner, but I can do it the way that I like it and I don’t think it looks too bad. And if you mess your eyeliner up just remember, you can always use your newly drawn wings to fly away from your problems.

*I apologise for the poor quality photos in this post, it's surprisingly difficult to take pictures of your own eye when you aren't wearing glasses*