Cosmetic sharpener

A cosmetic sharpener is a small hand sharpener sized for makeup pencils: one, two or three openings for slim eye and brow pencils, standard lip liners and fat jumbo crayons, usually with a lid or casing that catches the shavings. It works like the sharpener in a pencil case, but the cores it cuts are waxy and soft rather than graphite, which is why its openings are made to hold the pencil snugly.

Not every makeup pencil needs one. Twist-up and retractable pencils and felt-tip pens never need sharpening, though some are sold with a small sharpener for reshaping the tip. Wooden and wood-like pencils do, and sharpening is what gives a brow or lip pencil its fine point; some sharpeners can also cut a rounder, stronger end for shadow and face pencils.

Start with the pencils you own. Makeup pencils come in several diameters, and a pencil that wobbles in its opening sharpens lopsided and tends to snap; many houses design a sharpener for their own range and say which pencils it fits. A second, larger opening takes jumbo pencils, and some sharpeners add an adaptor ring so that one opening grips a thinner pencil. Look at the tip each cuts, too: most cut a fine point, while a few use a second blade or a tip former to leave a rounder end, sold as resisting breakage or as suiting shadow and face pencils.

The details decide how pleasant one is to live with. A lid that closes tightly keeps shavings out of a makeup bag. A pick or built-in cleaning tool clears the waxy build-up that clogs a blade. Blades are usually stainless steel, or carbon steel treated against rust; either dulls in the end, and a dull blade drags at a soft core instead of cutting it.

Chill a soft pencil for a few minutes before sharpening it, so that the core cuts cleanly instead of smearing or tearing. Push the pencil in straight and, as one house’s instructions put it, turn it slowly and steadily, pressing lightly, to avoid breakage. Stop as soon as a point has formed, since a long point on a soft core is a fragile one, and wipe the new tip before use.

Empty the lid and clear the blade every few uses, with the pick if there is one or a cotton bud if not: wax left on the blade is what drags on the next pencil and snaps it. Keep eye and lip pencils apart as well. The FDA advises against using a lip liner as an eyeliner, since it can carry contamination from the mouth to the eye, and against sharing eye cosmetics;^[1] by the same logic, clean the blade between lip and eye pencils, or keep a sharpener for each.

Different pencils want different points. For brows, a fine point draws the short strokes that pass for hairs, so sharpen little and often. Eyeliners take the same fine point at the lash line and a blunter one for smudging. A lip liner wants a point sharp enough for the edge of the lip but not so fine that it breaks on the first stroke. Jumbo crayons and shadow pencils suit the rounder end that some sharpeners cut, which lays colour on in a broad stroke. The softest pencils, such as gel liners, are the ones to chill first. And some pencils come unsharpened: Shu Uemura, for one, notes that its hard-formula brow pencil arrives that way, so the first cut is yours.

Many makeup pencils came from pencil makers: the German firm Schwan-Bleistift-Fabrik had been making eyebrow pencils since 1927,^[2] in wooden casings to be sharpened like any other. Their soft cores made that harder, and two answers were on offer within a few years of each other. One was to build the sharpening into the pencil. Maybelline’s eye range of 1960 included a Self-sharpening Eyebrow Pencil in seven shades,^[3] and in 1964 Max Factor introduced a Self Sharpening Automatic Eye Pencil;^[4] how either sharpened itself, the record does not say.

The other was a better sharpener. In 1960 two New Jersey inventors, Jack Fairchild Fleming and Otto Lehre, applied for a patent, granted in 1963 and assigned to Sterling Plastics of Union, for a pocket sharpener made for pencils with “relatively soft leads or coloring materials”, eyebrow and eyeshadow pencils among them. Its blade was the ordinary one of pocket sharpeners. What was new was everything around the blade: a passage that fitted the pencil’s barrel closely, so that the soft core was supported and would not be “twisted or broken off”; a path that shed broken bits of core away from the blade, so that the sharpener would not be “fouled”; and a closed chamber for the shavings, in a sharpener small enough to carry in a purse.^[5]

The sharpeners below answer the same three worries, with openings sized to a maker’s pencils, picks that clear the blade and lids that catch the shavings. The pocket sharpener with a lid, patented for eyebrow pencils in 1963, is still how a wooden makeup pencil keeps its point.