Kohl pencil

A kohl pencil is the softest kind of eye pencil: a core of waxes, oils and dark pigment in a wooden casing, sharpened to a blunt point and made to be smudged. It draws a line that stays movable for a minute or two, long enough to be pressed into the roots of the lashes, run along the waterline or softened with a brush into a haze. That softness is what separates it from the gel eyeliner pencil, which usually twists up from a plastic barrel and is made to set waterproof, and from a firm liner pencil, which holds a crisp edge but will not blur.

The name promises more history than the product has. Kohl in the older sense is a powder, traditionally ground from minerals and drawn along the eye from a small pot with a rod, and it has a long history of its own across Egypt, the Middle East and South Asia. A modern kohl pencil uses the word for a look rather than a recipe: black or nearly black, worn close to the eye, with soft edges.

Softness is the first choice, and it cuts both ways. A very creamy pencil lays down dense colour in one pass and smudges easily, which is the point; it also moves on its own through the day, especially on oily lids or on the lower lash line, where it collects in fine lines. A firmer pencil drags a little more but stays nearer where it was put. Some sharpenable pencils are now made with gel formulas and sold as waterproof: they blend for a short time and then set, a halfway house between the classic soft pencil and a gel pencil.

Colour is the second. Black gives the strongest frame and reads as the classic kohl-rimmed eye; dark brown and charcoal give the same shape with less contrast, which is often kinder to fair skin and in daylight. Bronze, plum and navy suit a smudged line better than a sharp one. If you mean to line the waterline, choose a pencil its maker says is suitable for it, and remember that sensitive eyes react to a formula, not to a price.

Warm the tip on the back of the hand for a second if it drags. Look down into a mirror, lift the upper lid gently at the outer corner, and draw in short strokes as close to the lash roots as you can, filling the gaps between the lashes rather than drawing a line above them. Then smudge at once, before the pencil firms: a small, dense smudger brush or a cotton bud, worked along the line, softens the edge without spreading the colour upward. Pressing a matching powder shadow over the smudged line deepens it and slows it from moving.

Two uses need care. Rimming the waterline, the moist inner rim of the lower lid, gives the most intense version of the look, but it makes the eye look smaller and wears off there first. Tightlining, pressing colour into the upper waterline from beneath the lashes, makes the lashes look thicker with no visible line at all. Sharpen before each use: a fresh surface is cleaner than a worn one, and it draws a finer line.

The pencil is the Western part of this story. Cosmetics and Skin, an independent history site built from trade literature, argues that powdered kohl never took hold in Europe and America for three reasons: black alone could not match the range of colours Western eye makeup was sold in, the belief that kohl protected the eyes had no following there, and the pencil did the job more simply. It was cheap to make, easy to use and safe to carry in a bag, where a powder needed a bottle, a separate applicator and a steadier hand.^[1] Pencils for the eyes were already on sale by 1904, when a newspaper beauty column listed among the contents of the make-up box “kohl which is very unnatural, and, many black and brown pencils to line the eyes with along the eyelashes”.^[2]

For much of the twentieth century the same soft pencil served brows and eyes. The German maker Schwan-Bleistift-Fabrik had been making eyebrow pencils since 1927, and by the 1950s supplied them to other brands to sell under their own names;^[3] in the late 1960s Frances Denney still sold an Eye Beauty Pencil “for accenting and shaping eyebrows and as an eye liner”.^[4] The softness that let such pencils smudge also made them snap. A patent granted in 1963 described a sharpener built so that the core of an eyebrow or eyeshadow pencil, made of “a relatively soft coloring or cosmetic material”, would not be “twisted or broken off”.^[5]

The word kohl came back to the label as fashion, not chemistry. Helena Rubinstein sold a powdered Egyptian Kohol, applied with an ivory stick, in 1907, and Elizabeth Arden a powdered Kôhl-Arabia in small urn-shaped flacons in 1955;^[1] a kohl pencil today is, in Cosmetics and Skin’s phrase for such products, “kohl” in name only.^[1] The distinction matters. In the United States the FDA treats traditional kohl, kajal and surma as illegal colour additives, and notes that lead sometimes makes up more than half their weight.^[6] A pencil that borrows the name has not borrowed the formula, and the powder should not be mistaken for it.