Demure makeup has defined the eye for the past few years, but now a bold new line is being drawn. Here, a testament to the power of eyeliner.
Brigitte Bardot is wearing nothing but eyeliner. In the opening scene of Jean-Luc Godard’s “Contempt,” the camera lingers on Bardot’s body as she sprawls in bed. Shot through a red lens, her features disappear until only the striking Cleopatra line along her eyes stands out. It is somehow the eye makeup, not the nakedness, that tells us about this character. Without the eyeliner, Bardot is an ingénue. With it, she’s a femme fatale. The eyeliner is important. It practically plays a supporting role.
The cosmetic pencil arrived on the scene in the early 20th century, when Russian ballerinas, drawing burnt cork around their eyes, inspired Elizabeth Arden and Helena Rubinstein to create commercial versions. The 1922 discovery of King Tut’s tomb set off an Egyptian craze, and a look that was initially associated with dancers, actresses and the demimonde became an upper-crust accessory to wear when shattering both Champagne glasses and social norms.
Eyeliner’s bad-girl reputation has held sway ever since. From the 1950s cat’s-eye and punk’s deliberate smear to the more restrained geometric line that has appeared on the street and runways this season, nothing else so instantly conjures female sexuality — as both teenage girls and their dismayed mothers know. (When Lindsay Lohan insisted on wearing her own eyeliner in “The Canyons,” she told the producer Braxton Pope that it made her look as if she’d graduated from her Disney days.)
The raccoon rings of the 1920s Bright Young Things were refined along the way to the much more technical line of the 1950s and the Nouvelle Vague ’60s. Posters for “La Dolce Vita” of Anita Ekberg with high-drama cat’s-eyes might as well have been advertisements for eyeliner itself, and Jean Seberg’s spare style in “Breathless” — shorn hair, a striped T-shirt and a bare face but for a restrained, artistic upper line — could easily be worn today. Max Factor and Mary Quant offered application tips for new crayonlike sticks and pots of “cake liner” — modern tools to achieve the look.
When rock merged with art, eyeliner was adopted by both genders, and piratical outlines appeared on everyone from Ziggy Stardust-era David Bowie to Warholian superstars like Edie Sedgwick and Lou Reed. (You can only hope they passed a stick of eyeliner back and forth in the bathroom at Max’s Kansas City.) By the 1980s, the makeup artist Way Bandy’s book “Styling Your Face” brought the larger-than-life look perfected on supermodels like Janice Dickinson to the masses, and women hit the street in Studio 54 jumpsuits or bow-tied blouses and Technicolor outlines that made them look like Duran Duran video extras.
Eyeliner came back down to earth, of course, as it had to. Except for the occasional “smoky eye” that’s all too easy to mess up, a much more demure natural chic has reigned in recent years. The clean, neat, almost geometrical line that takes off at the edge of the eye is a fresh departure, at once retro and modern, and it has become the angelic-vamp look of choice for pop stars like Beyoncé and Lana Del Rey. Perhaps it’s time for a return to a bit of drama ourselves, to the images conjured while you stare in the mirror, carefully drawing that line along your lashes: a sequined minidress shooting quasars through nightclub smoke, a lowered-eyes glance over a fur coat. This is eyeliner’s black-magic promise: A black so striking that the entire world falls in love with the night. The blacker the better.
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