Felt-tip eyeliner

A felt-tip eyeliner is liquid liner in the form of a marker: a slim pen whose barrel holds the ink and feeds it, through a reservoir or a wick, to a firm, tapered tip of pressed fibres. It draws like a pen on paper. The tip does not splay the way a brush does, so the line is steadier and the stroke easier to repeat, and there is no bottle to dip into and no brush to reload. That is why it is the easiest way to draw a wing.

The same firmness is its limit. A felt tip draws a narrower range of line than the brush of a dip liner, which can go from hair-fine to bold in one stroke, and a tip that has dried or frayed cannot be replaced. Beside a liquid liner it is easier and a little less exact; beside a gel pencil it is sharper and does not smudge at all. Some pens sold as liquid liners have a tiny brush in place of the felt; those behave more like a dip liner and take more control.

Feel the tip before anything else. A fine, stiff point draws the thinnest line and the crispest wing. A thicker or softer, more brush-like felt lays colour down faster and makes a bold line easier, at some cost in precision. Then the formula: most felt-tip liners now claim to be waterproof or smudge-proof, most dry matte, and most come in black, with a brown or two for a softer line.

Buy for how often you will use it. A pen that sits unused dries at the tip long before its ink is gone, and most cannot be refilled. Store it with the cap firmly on — several makers also ask for it to be kept tip-down, so the ink stays at the nib — and replace it when the line starts to skip or turn grey, rather than pressing harder, which frays the felt and spoils the point for good.

From the outside a felt-tip liner and a brush pen look alike, and the pack does not always say which is which. The difference shows in the stroke. A felt nib is a pressed pad of fibres: it holds its shape, draws a line of even width, and is the easiest to steady, which is why so many first liners use one. A brush pen has separate hairs that bend and spread under pressure, so it can swell a line from hair-fine to bold, but it punishes a shaky hand. Some makers split the difference with a flexible or “brush-like” felt that bends a little without splaying, and a few use a fine sponge.

If you have a steady hand and want the sharpest possible flick, a brush tip will give you more. If you want the same line every morning, with the least practice, a felt tip is the surer tool.

The pen turns the wing into a sequence rather than a single stroke. With the eye open and looking straight ahead, draw the flick first: a short line from the outer corner, following the angle of the lower lash line up towards the tail of the brow. Close the eye and draw a second line from the tip of the flick back down to the upper lash line, about a third of the way in, then fill the triangle. Finally line the rest of the lash line from the inner corner outward in short strokes, thickening it as it meets the wing.

Hold the pen almost flat to the lid for a thick line and upright for a thin one, and keep the pressure light: a felt tip draws best when it barely touches. On an oily lid, a little powder shadow pressed along the lash line first gives the felt a drier surface to grip. If one wing ends higher than the other, lengthen the lower one rather than cutting the higher one back, and tidy the edge with a pointed cotton bud and a little remover.

The eyeliner pen is a borrowing from the stationery shop, and its history is short and poorly recorded; no one can be named with confidence as having sold the first. The clearest early evidence is a patent. Revlon filed for a new eyeliner formula in 1986, and its patent, granted in 1991, states that “a wick-type nib pen which delivers a steady flow of coloring liquid has been available in Europe and Japan as a delivery system for eyeliner cosmetics”: a nib of porous urethane-nylon, fed from a cartridge of liquid liner.^[1]

The same document explains why such pens were slow to reach the United States. The liquids that flowed well through a wick were coloured with water-soluble organic dyes that the FDA had not approved for use around the eye, while the pigments that were approved, such as iron oxides, are insoluble particles large enough to clog a fibre nib. Revlon’s answer was to grind approved pigments to five microns or less and keep them suspended with a film-forming polymer, polyvinylpyrrolidone, so that they would travel through the felt without blocking it.^[1] Getting pigment rather than dye to flow through felt is the problem the format was built around, and every pen on the counter is an answer to it.