Gel eyeliner pencil

A gel eyeliner pencil is a liner in a twist-up or click barrel whose lead is a soft gel: pigment carried in oils, waxes and a solvent that evaporates after application, leaving a film that resists water and smudging. It goes on almost as easily as a kohl pencil and wears almost as well as a liquid. The catch is timing. For a minute or so after it touches the skin the line can be blended or smoked out; after that it sets, and it stays until an oil-based or waterproof remover takes it off.

That behaviour, rather than the barrel, separates it from its neighbours. A kohl pencil in a wooden casing stays soft and movable all day; gel liner from a pot is the same idea as this one, applied with a brush; and a liquid liner dries almost at once, with no smudging time at all. The gel pencil is the compromise between them: most of the ease of the first, most of the staying power of the last.

The tip decides the line. A standard gel pencil has a lead a few millimetres across and draws a soft, medium line that is easy to smudge. The ultra-fine and micro versions, with leads of about a millimetre and a half, are made for tightlining and for drawing the base of a wing; they wear down quickly and snap if they are wound out too far. Some barrels carry a sharpener in the cap or the base, to restore a point to a lead that has blunted, and many carry a smudger at the other end.

Read the mechanism before the first use. Many twist-up and click liners only wind out, never back in, so dispense a little at a time; a lead left standing out of its barrel dries at the surface and drags. For the waterline, choose one its maker describes as safe to use there. Black and dark brown do most of the work. The metallic and jewel shades that gel formulas carry well are easiest to wear as a smudged line along the upper lashes, where a little shimmer reads as light rather than as glitter.

Work one eye at a time, because of the setting time. Draw along the upper lash line in one or two long strokes from the inner third outward, holding the pencil almost flat against the lid rather than on its point: the side of a gel lead lays down smoother colour than the tip. To soften the line, go over it at once with the smudger or a small brush, then leave it alone. Going back once it has begun to set tears the film and leaves patches.

For a wing, draw the flick first with the sharpest part of the lead, then join it to the lash line. On the lower lash line use less than you think, and keep it to the outer half. Removal needs more than water: an oil-based cleanser or a waterproof eye makeup remover, held against the closed eye for a few seconds before wiping, lifts the film without rubbing.

Gel pencils are the liner most often sold for the waterline, because they set rather than melt. Even so, the waterline is the wettest place a liner goes, and no formula lasts there as long as it does on the lid, so expect to touch it up. Put contact lenses in first, keep the pencil for your own use, and wipe the tip with a clean tissue before capping it, so that nothing from the eye is wound back into the barrel.

Colour does more in a gel pencil than in most liners. The formula carries metallics and brights without the patchiness of a powdery pencil, which makes it the easiest way to try a navy, bronze or green line; worn close to the lashes and smudged a little, even a bright shade reads as definition rather than decoration. For every day, dark brown or charcoal is softer than black and forgives an uneven hand.

The barrel came long before the gel. Maybelline, which had begun selling a cake eyelash and eyebrow beautifier in 1917, listed an Automatic Eyebrow and Eyeliner Pencil among its new products in 1954, and by 1968 sold a Fine Line Automatic Eye-Liner Pencil.^[1] Max Factor introduced a Self Sharpening Automatic Eye Pencil in 1964.^[2] Yardley followed its Self-Sharpening Eyeliner of 1962, in a gold-tone case, with Velvet Eye Liner in 1966, advertised as “a soft, easy-to-use, propelling pencil to accentuate or alter the shape of the eyes”.^[3] The appeal was the one still sold today: a point that needs no separate sharpener, in a case that goes in a handbag.

What those propelling pencils did not do was set. The waterproof gel lead is younger and far less well documented than the barrel: the record does not show who first put a smudge-then-set formula into a twist-up case, and the brands’ own accounts of their firsts are best read as marketing. What the shelves show is that the format is now made at every price, from drugstore to prestige, because it answers the oldest complaint about eye pencils — that the soft line which is easy to draw is also the line that has moved by lunchtime.