Are you obsessively trying to perfect cat eyes? You are not alone.
Writer, actor and director Cazzie David, all of 26, has an explanation. She writes an “essay” on www.vogue.com, where she names “the make-up of the moment”. It’s black eyeliner.
“There’s literally been no other option. But despite the lower half of our faces being covered for the last 12 months, there are other reasons I’d like to suggest for why eyeliner remains the only thing we want to wear in the New Year. Yes, this is an entire essay about eyeliner,” David goes on.
“My raccoon eyes, which I erratically traced with Urban Decay’s 24/7 Glide-On Pencil in high school, had the ability to immediately inform strangers that I was annoyed and that I didn’t like attention, even though I was simultaneously bringing attention to myself,” she writes. But eye liners had other powers at other times.
“Ancient cultures used black kajal and kohl for protection and as a statement of power,” David quotes celebrity make-up artist Pati Dubroff as saying, when trying to explain “dark eyeliner’s unique ability to convey our collective emotional state”.
Wearing it now makes us feel as though we have power over the last year, David further quotes Dubroff as saying.
The eyeliner “can create a character within a mood”, David also quotes Daniel Parker as saying. “He would know; as the lead hair and make-up designer for Netflix’s popular miniseries The Queen’s Gambit, Parker used a variety of black eyeliners — MAC’s cult favourite Blacktrack Gel and Pencil in Smoulder, as well as liquid pens from brands such as Christian Dior, YSL Beauty, and Tom Ford — … so you never once find yourself thinking, Hey, isn’t it kind of weird that Beth Harmon puts on a winged eyeliner, every morning and night, to practice chess, alone?”
The eyeliner does something that makes it good company. It is a strong presence.
“Even a cat eye seems almost doable to me now, a skill I will spend the rest of quarantine improving until my number comes up years from now in the vaccine queue; after that, maybe I’ll learn how to return things,” says David.
