Single eyeshadow

A single eyeshadow is one colour of pressed powder in its own small compact. The powder is mostly a smooth mineral base, traditionally talc, with pigments for colour, a metallic soap such as zinc stearate to help it cling to the lid, and a little binder to hold everything together when it is pressed into the pan.^[1] The same cake, multiplied, fills a quad or a palette. What a single changes is how the colour is bought.

Buying shadow one shade at a time means paying only for the colours you wear, replacing only the pan that runs out, and never owning the eight shades a palette includes to make up its numbers. It is how exact colours are found, too: the right brown for a crease, a particular blue, a shimmer for the centre of the lid. Many singles are now sold as bare pans that drop into a magnetic case, so a set can be built one pan at a time. Against a cream shadow, pressed powder blends more easily and is less inclined to settle into the crease;^[1] what it gives up is intensity from a single layer.

The finish decides where a single earns its place. A matte shade has no shine and reads as shadow, which is why the transition shade in the crease and the deep shade at the outer corner are usually matte. A satin has a soft sheen and suits the whole lid on most skin. Shimmer and metallic shades carry reflective particles, mica or synthetic pearl, and belong in the centre of the lid, where the light catches them; on crêpey or textured lids they show the texture, and a satin usually looks better.

Shimmer behaves differently in the pan, too. It is harder to press than matte powder: a Revlon patent of 1976 notes that cakes of more than about a third mica compacted poorly, and that the oils added to bind them caused surface glazing, “a common defect in such preparations”.^[2] Pressed shadows have long been made to be used wet as well as dry,^[3] and many metallic singles are still sold that way: a damp brush turns a sheen into foil.

Four singles cover most of what eyeshadow does. Start with a transition shade, a matte a little deeper than your skin, to blend through the crease; a lid shade in satin or shimmer; a deep matte for the outer corner and the lash line; and, if your skin needs one, a pale matte or satin for the brow bone and inner corner. Colour comes after: a single blue or green is easier to wear when the neutrals around it are already right.

Pigment varies more than the pans suggest, so judge a shade on the lid, where most shadows go on sheerer than a finger swatch. Deep skin needs deeper transition and definition shades than many neutral ranges include, which is one more argument for buying them singly.

Tap the brush on the pan rather than swirling it, and knock off the excess before it reaches the eye. A flat shader brush packs colour onto the lid, pressed rather than swept; a fluffy blending brush diffuses it through the crease in small back-and-forth strokes. Work from the lightest shade to the deepest and blend the edges last. A thin primer or base underneath keeps the colour true to the pan and slows creasing.

A pan that turns hard and shiny on top has glazed: oil from fingers or a damp brush has sealed the surface. A clean, dry brush, or a light scrape of the top layer, usually brings it back. Keep brushes clean and the pan to yourself; the FDA advises washing your hands before applying eye cosmetics and not sharing them.^[4]

Western eye shadow began partly as a powder. Helena Rubinstein sold a black powder, Kohol Jet Grains, in 1907, and Elizabeth Arden a soft brown Venetian Shading Powder in 1914, though before the Second World War the commonest eye shadow was a paste, smoothed on with the little finger.^[5] Eye shadow in a compact was on sale by 1930, when the Kurlash company introduced Shadette and Arden’s eye range included Venetian Eye Sha-Do in a compact, each shade a purchase of its own.^[6][7]

Pressed powder became common only after the war, and in the 1960s it became the most popular form: it blended easily, could be made matt or glossy, and was less prone than paste to form lines in the crease.^[5] The switch shows in the catalogues. Max Factor’s Hi-Fi Powder Eye Shadow of 1961 was a loose powder with its own applicator; its Shadow Play Brush Eye Shadow of 1965 was compressed.^[8] Revlon’s Brush-On Eyeshadow, one of its “Beautiful Young Brush-Ons” of the mid-1960s, was a pressed powder “frosted or not”, part of the house’s answer to the natural look.^[9]

The single pan has since become a unit of its own. A Kanebo patent granted in the United States in 1991, from an application first filed there in 1982, starts from the problem that pans glued into a palette-type case meant throwing the case away when one ran out, and holds them with magnets instead, so they can be rearranged or replaced.^[10] That is how many singles are now sold: as a pan for a case of one’s own choosing.