Crease brush

A crease brush is a small, tapered eye brush: a narrow bundle of fibres coming to a soft point, dense enough to hold its shape and loose enough to blend. The point goes into the socket, the fold between the moving lid and the brow bone, and lays a line of deeper shadow there; the sides of the brush then soften its upper edge. The effect is depth. Shadow set where the eye naturally recedes makes the lid look deeper-set and the eye larger.

It is the most precise of the blending brushes. A fluffy blender is larger and looser and diffuses more than it places; a domed brush is rounder and packs more colour; a pencil brush is shorter and firmer still, made for the lash line. The crease brush also does small jobs well: the outer V, a transition shade on a small lid, and softening liner at the outer corner.

Size the brush to the socket. On a deep-set eye with plenty of lid, a medium tapered brush lays a wide transition shade quickly; on a small, close-set or hooded eye, a small crease brush with a fine tip places colour exactly, and two in the carousel are sold with hooded lids in mind. The finer the point, the more precise the line, and the more blending it will need afterwards.

On hooded eyes, the crease to shade is not the natural fold, which disappears when the eye is open, but a line a little above it. Look straight ahead into the mirror, find where the fold of skin meets the brow bone, and place the colour there, so that it shows with the eyes open. A monolid has no fold at all; there the brush works a gradient upward from the lash line instead, deepest at the lashes.

Fibre makes less difference here than on larger brushes. Most crease brushes are synthetic and work with cream as well as powder; Rephr has its small crease brushes made by hand in Kumano, in Japan, of natural hair. What matters more is that the tip keeps its point after washing.

Hold the brush near the end of the handle and set the tip in the socket at the outer corner. Sweep it inward in short back-and-forth strokes, no further than above the centre of the pupil, then lighten the pressure and let the sides of the brush blur the upper edge upward. Build a second, deeper layer only at the outer third. Keep the lower edge crisper than the upper: a crease reads as depth when it fades towards the brow and holds its line against the lid.

The same brush draws the outer V. Set the tip at the outer end of the lash line, sweep it up and out to meet the end of the crease line, and fill the small triangle between them with the deepest shade, blending its inner edge into the lid.

A cut crease sharpens that lower edge on purpose. Lay the shadow in the socket with the crease brush and blend it upward, then press concealer or a pale shade across the lid with a flat brush, stopping exactly at the socket line, so that the line becomes an edge.

Three habits account for most muddy creases. Starting too far in: colour carried past the centre of the eye towards the nose closes the eye up, so keep the deepest shade to the outer third. Too much colour at once: a crease built in two thin layers blends more evenly than one heavy one. And blending with a loaded brush: once the shade is placed, finish with the crease brush almost empty, or with a clean fluffy blender, so that the edge fades instead of spreading. If a crease still looks like a stripe, its upper edge is too hard: soften it with a clean fluffy blender and a touch of the transition shade, rather than adding more of the deep one.

Eye make-up came into its own in the 1960s. Eye shadow had not been a major seller before the Second World War; its sales rose in the late 1950s and early 1960s, as lipsticks went pale and mascara, eyeliner and eye shadow came into colourful use.^[1] Mary Quant, launching her make-up in 1966, aimed at what the journalist Margaret Allen, writing in 1981, called the “pale unmade-up look on the face and lips with all the focus on the eyes”.^[2]

The crease line belongs to that decade too, and it was drawn as much as shaded. Allure, describing the mod eye’s return in 2021, dates its “pastel colors, dark creases, and exaggerated lash lines” to the 1960s and to figures such as Twiggy and Cher, and the makeup artists it quotes place the crease line not in the natural fold but just above it, “to create the illusion of bigger, deeper-set eyes”.^[3]

The crease brush is that line softened. It puts the shadow where the mod eye drew its stroke, a little above the natural fold, and blurs it upward, so that the depth stays and the line goes. The cut crease, which keeps the lower edge sharp, is the same drawing with the edge left in.