Cake eyeliner

Cake eyeliner is liner sold dry: a pressed cake of pigment and binder, like a small watercolour pan, which becomes paint when a wet brush is worked across it. Because you make the liquid yourself, you decide how it behaves. A barely damp brush gives a soft, slightly powdery line that can be smudged; more water gives a flowing, opaque one that can be drawn as fine and sharp as any liquid liner. Once dry it sets matte and stays put, although many cakes are not waterproof.

That control, and the long life of a dry product, are why it survives in makeup artists’ kits and in the theatre, where a colour can be mixed to order and a cake outlasts any number of pens. Next to a gel pot it is more work, and next to a liquid liner it is slower, but no other liner lets the wearer set its consistency stroke by stroke.

Use as little water as you can. Dampen a fine or angled liner brush, blot off the excess, and work it across the surface of the cake in small circles until the bristles carry a creamy paint. Too much water gives a thin, streaky line that dries grey; too little gives a dry, broken one. Test the consistency on the back of the hand before going near the eye.

Draw as you would with a gel: in short strokes along the lash roots, or with the flick drawn first for a wing, reloading the brush rather than pressing harder. For a softer effect, lay the line with a damp angled brush and blur its edge with a clean, dry one before it sets. Afterwards let the cake dry with the lid open, and never flood its whole surface: a cake kept damp in a closed compact is where bacteria grow.

Cake liners come in two families. Classic cakes, black and brown pressed powders in a small compact, are the everyday version and the one to choose for a soft, matte line. Hydra or water-activated liners, many of them sold for graphic looks and face art, are denser and come in brights, neons and metallics; they draw a more opaque line but can crack if laid on thickly. Either way, check that the cake is sold for use on the eyes. Some water-activated colours are face and body paints first, and not every pigment in them is permitted around the eye.

Because the paint is mixed on the brush, one cake does several jobs. With little water it gives a soft line that can be pressed into the roots of the lashes and left slightly diffuse, closer to a shadow than a stroke. With more, it draws a crisp, opaque line for a graphic wing. The same black cake can tightline the upper waterline on a barely damp flat brush, and it will set a pencil line drawn underneath it, sharpening the edge and slowing the pencil from moving.

Colour works the same way. White and pale cakes brighten the lower lash line or double a black line with a thin second one above it; the brights and neons sold for stage and festival looks are laid on thickly, in one pass, because a cake line built up in layers tends to crack.

A cake keeps for years if it is kept dry and clean. Use a clean brush each time, rinse it before it goes back to the pan, and never share the cake: whatever the brush picks up from one eye it leaves on the surface for the next. If the top turns glossy and hard, which is the binder coming to the surface, rub it gently with a clean, dry tissue to reach fresh colour beneath. A dry cake also travels better than any pen or pot: it cannot leak, and it does not dry out between uses, which is part of why artists keep them in their kits.

The wet brush and the pressed cake reached the eyes by way of mascara. Maybelline’s product of 1917, a cake eyelash and eyebrow beautifier, came as a block stamped with the name, boxed with a small bristle brush and a mirror, and was applied by wetting the cake and lifting the colour with the brush.^[1] By the late 1960s the cake was one of the three forms eyeliner itself was sold in, beside the pencil and the liquid. Frances Denney’s Cake Eye Liner of 1967 was “Drama for your eyes in a pressed powder. In compact complete with brush.”^[2] Gala of London added a Cake Eye Liner later in the decade,^[3] and in 1968 Maybelline sold an Ultra-Liner Cake Eye Liner alongside its waterproof fluid liner and its automatic pencil.^[1]

The same years borrowed openly from the paint box. Mary Quant, launching her cosmetics on 28 March 1966, claimed to have used artists’ materials such as paint brushes, water-colour paint boxes and crayons.^[4] The cake liner is the eye product that stayed closest to that idea. It has outlasted many of its contemporaries by remaining useful where control and a long shelf life matter more than speed: in professional kits, on the stage, and in the graphic, colourful liner looks for which many cakes are now sold.