Lip liner

A lip liner is a pencil like any other: a core of colour — waxes, oils and pigment, firmer than a lipstick’s — set in a casing of wood or a wood-like composite and sharpened to a point. The firmness is the point of it. A lipstick is soft so that it spreads; a liner is hard enough to hold a fine line and to stay where it is drawn, which is why it is used at the edge of the mouth, where colour otherwise creeps into the fine lines around the lips.

It has two close relatives. A retractable liner is the same idea in a twist-up case that seldom needs sharpening but offers only the one tip its maker chose. A lip crayon is a fatter, softer pencil with lipstick-strength colour, meant to fill as well as outline. The wooden pencil gives the finest line of the three and the most control over it, because you decide how sharp to keep it.

The most useful liner matches your natural lip colour at its edge, not your lipstick: it disappears under any shade and corrects the shape without announcing itself. A liner matched to one lipstick is the next step, and worth it for strong colours — reds, berries, deep browns — which bleed most visibly. One a shade deeper than the lipstick gives definition; a much darker one worn as an outline around a paler centre is a look in its own right, not a correction.

Texture matters as much as colour. A creamy pencil glides and is kinder to dry lips but softens and smudges sooner; a firmer matte one lasts and stays sharp but can drag. Try it on the lip line itself rather than the back of the hand.

Work on bare lips or over a balm that has been blotted. Mark the cupid’s bow with two short strokes that meet in a V, then a short line at the centre of the lower lip, then draw from each corner towards those marks in short, light strokes rather than one long line. Take the pencil a little way inward and shade, so no hard edge is left when the lipstick wears.

To make lips look fuller, draw just outside the natural line at the centre of each lip and return to it at the corners; overlining the corners pulls the mouth down. Drawing just inside the line makes lips look smaller. Filling the whole lip with the pencil before lipstick gives the longest-wearing base there is.

Sharpen before each use, which also leaves a clean tip, and use a sharpener made for cosmetic pencils: soft cores snap in one meant for graphite. If the pencil is soft or the room is warm, ten minutes in the fridge first gives a cleaner point.

The commonest is a liner darker than both the lips and the lipstick, left behind as a ring when the colour wears from the centre. Match the liner to your lips, or shade it inward so that it fades rather than stops. The second is one long, hard line drawn in a single pass; short strokes follow the curve of the mouth and are easier to correct. The third is overlining right into the corners, which drags the mouth down and shows in profile. And a blunt pencil drags colour into the fine lines around the lips, so sharpen it before you start.

The drawn edge of the mouth is older than the pencil, and its early history is mostly legend. The most repeated story has Elizabeth Arden handing out lip paste and a Venetian lip pencil to American suffragists in 1912; the Makeup Museum found no mention of either product before 1919, and no telling of the story earlier than 1999.^[1] What can be dated is the idea of a separate liner. After the Second World War several makers sold long, slim lipsticks — sometimes called pencil types — as lip liners, to be used with a lipstick of ordinary length: Revlon’s Lip-Fashion in 1947, Rimmel’s Lip Fashion Pencil and Gala’s Lip Liner in 1948, and a second wave in the 1960s that included Max Factor’s Fine Line of 1962. Cosmetics and Skin records that the first wave had little success.^[2]

The word was still loose enough in 1955 for a Los Angeles inventor, Jessie Weiler, to file a patent for a “lip liner” that was not a pencil at all but a wire guide, shaped to the upper lip, that printed an outline in rouge.^[3] The technique travelled further than any product. After the war, Japanese magazines introduced an American method — draw the outline of the lips with a lip brush, fill it, blot with a tissue — and it turned Japanese women away from the older preference for colouring only the centre of the lips to make the mouth look small.^[4] The sharpened cosmetic pencil was by then ordinary enough that in 1960 a New Jersey firm applied for a patent on a pocket sharpener for eyebrow and eyeshadow pencils, designed so that their soft cores would not snap.^[5] The pairing those post-war makers sold — a liner with its own lipstick — is still the sensible way to use one.