After our recent chat with Arizona Muse, in which she exalted brown eyeliner and called mascara “the most easily spotted makeup,” we’ve had trouble applying our standby black liner/mascara combo with the same gusto. In fact, since hearing about how Muse simply rims the top and bottom of her eyes with a coffee-colored pencil—for a look that's like “hav[ing] no makeup on, but somehow your eyes are just popping”—we’ve been searching for the right technique and tools to pull that off.
And we weren’t alone: backstage at Chloé during Paris Fashion Week Spring 2014, Diane Kendal (the same woman behind Alexander Wang’s “raw beauty”) accented the models' dewy, extra-moisturized skin with a nearly undetectable chocolate liner. How exactly? She traced along the top and lower lashes with Mac Powerpoint Eye Pencil in Duck and then went over said lines with a Q-tip coated in what we’ll call a 'whisper' of Embryolisse. The mix of pencil and cream, Kendal explains, “left behind a 'residue' that made the lids look dewy with a hint of color'— precisely the moody, no-makeup makeup Muse had been talking about. (If we hadn’t seen the girls pre- Kendal’s subtle handiwork, we would have guessed they weren't wearing anything at all.) But the change was certainly apparent—their eyes were a little bit cooler... in the way that Stephane Marais must have wanted Linda Evangelista to look when he supposedly asked her to sleep in her makeup the night before a shoot.
At home, MAC’s Duck, traced along the lash lines, looks like the remnants of last night's makeup in a great way, but we’re also partial to MAC’s Fluidline in Rich Ground, which lends a warmer, more metallic effect. And to amp up either product for day-to-night, try a very thin application of Guerlain’s Khôl Me Kajal over the brown liner, blended gently with a brush. It usually does the trick—no mascara necessary.
[1-2] Photographed by Emily Weiss backstage at Chloe Spring 2013 on September 29, 2013 in Paris, [3] Photo by Mathea Millman.