Soft Brown Wing

• 

  Pencil liner

  Keeps about 12 months once it is open.

• 

  Concealer

  Keeps about 12 months once it is open.

• 

  Cotton buds

  A tool. No expiry, wash it.

Signed in, the school reads this list against your own bag and names the swap for anything missing.

Read your face once and the mirror draws this line for your eye shape, on both sides.

1. Step 1

   Get your things out

   Brown pencil out, and a cotton bud and concealer beside you if you own them. A whole eye goes on in one order, shadow first, then liner, then curl, then mascara, so this wing is the second of those four and your lashes stay bare until the end. Rest your elbow on a table and your ring finger on your cheekbone, that is what steadies the line, not gripping the pencil harder.

2. Step 2

   Find the outer corner

   Look straight ahead, not up. Your wing starts where your lower lash line ends, on the lashes, not on the bare skin past them. Put one light dot there and check it before you draw anything, because everything else grows out of it.

3. Step 3

   Find the wing direction

   Lay the pencil flat along your lower lash line and let that angle carry on upwards. Your wing follows that line and stops under the tail of your brow. Going past the stopping point does not make the wing bigger, it makes it point at your hairline.

4. Step 4

   Sketch it in dashes

   Draw the wing as three or four short dashes along the trace instead of one long stroke. Short dashes stay where you put them, a long stroke follows your wrist. Keep your eye open and never pull your lid sideways, because a wing drawn on a stretched lid crumples the moment you let go.

5. Step 5

   Connect and fill

   Bring a line from the tip of the wing back down to your lashes so you have a thin triangle, then fill that triangle with the side of the pencil. Now run the pencil along your upper lash line from the outer corner inwards, getting thinner as it goes and stopping two thirds of the way in. Brown hides a wobbly edge, so fill it rather than wiping it off and starting again.

6. Step 6

   Clean the edge and look

   Run a dry cotton bud once along the underside of the wing to straighten the edge. One pass only, going back and forth lifts the liner off with it, and a little concealer on the bud cuts that edge sharper. Then look at yourself in daylight and check both wings end at the same height, height is what people see, not length.