Retractable lip liner

A retractable lip liner is the lip pencil made mechanical. Its core — waxes, oils and pigment, firm enough to hold a line — sits in a slim plastic or metal barrel and is wound out by twisting the other end, a millimetre at a time, the way a bullet lipstick is. Because the core is thin and never cut back along with a wooden case, the tip stays roughly the same width from the first use to the last: there are no shavings, no sharpener to carry and no wood to splinter.

That consistency is also its limit. A wooden pencil can be sharpened to a needle or left blunt; a retractable gives the one tip its maker chose. Many now carry a small sharpener in the cap or the base anyway, to bring a worn tip back to a point, so “never needs sharpening” is better read as “seldom”. And the formulas lean firm: wind a soft core too far out of its barrel and it bends.

Choose a retractable if you line your lips on the move, if you want the same edge every time without thinking about it, or if soft pencils keep snapping in your sharpener. Choose wood if you want to vary the line — sharp for a crisp edge, blunt for a soft, smudged one — or if you like the creamiest textures. One of each is a reasonable answer: a retractable in the bag, a wooden pencil at home.

Look at the mechanism before you buy. A good one winds back fully, so the core is protected under the cap; a few wind only one way and are meant to be twisted up a fraction at a time and never back. A brush or a primer at the other end is a convenience, not a different kind of product.

Twist up only a millimetre or two; a long lead bends under pressure and snaps. Hold the barrel close to the tip, rest your little finger on your chin to steady the hand, and draw in short strokes: the cupid’s bow first, then the centre of the lower lip, then in from each corner. Turn the barrel a little as you go, so the tip wears evenly instead of to one flat side.

Wind it back before capping, every time, and wipe the tip after use. If it has gone blunt, draw a few strokes on the back of the hand while rolling the pencil, or use the built-in sharpener if there is one, taking off as little as you can. To make lips look fuller, draw just outside the natural line at the centre of each lip and come back to it at the corners.

Retractable liners tend to be firm and matte, which makes them best at a liner’s plainest job: an exact match for your lips or your lipstick, drawn at the edge and shaded a little inward. A much darker outline is harder to soften with a fine, firm tip. Choose the formula for how long the line has to last. Waterproof and transfer-proof liners set and stay, and need an oil-based remover; creamier ones blend more easily and fade sooner.

A lead that snaps has almost always been wound out too far: keep a millimetre showing and wind up as it wears. One that bends has usually been left somewhere warm, in a car or a pocket; a few minutes in the fridge firms it again. A tip worn flat on one side comes from holding the pencil at one angle, so roll it as you draw. And a line that skips has usually met balm that was never blotted.

The mechanism is older than the product. James Bruce Mason Jr.’s swivel lipstick holder, patented in 1923, already wound a cosmetic stick out of its case and back again with a turning head.^[1] In 1941 John W. Anderson of Danbury, Connecticut, applied for a patent on a holder made almost entirely of moulded plastic for “holding, expelling, using and retracting pencil-like sticks” of cosmetics, lipsticks among them.^[2] And in 1948 two Connecticut inventors, assigning their rights to the Risdon Manufacturing Company, filed a patent for rotary holders “characterized by a long, slender appearance”, in which a stick was projected and withdrawn by turning — used at the time, the patent says, principally for lipsticks.^[3]

In the same years makers began to sell long, slim lipsticks — sometimes called pencil types — as lip liners, to go 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, in a second wave, Max Factor’s Fine Line of 1962. Cosmetics and Skin records that the first wave had little success.^[4] Sharpened wooden pencils, meanwhile, had a weakness of their own: in 1960 a New Jersey firm applied for a patent on a pocket sharpener built so that the soft cores of cosmetic pencils would not twist or break off in it.^[5] The twist-up liner sold today answers that weakness with the lipstick’s old mechanism. Its own recent history is thin, and we have found no reliable record of who sold the first.