Winged eyeliner is probably the most loved and despised make-up look ever. If you get it right, it’s going to give you a beautiful cat eye look and make your day a bit more bearable. If you get it wrong, you’re going to end up with the appearance of crooked eyes and a day full of frustration and anger.

In order to avoid the later, I’ve tried to put up a tutorial that you could use as a guide. And in this tutorial I used a brush with a gel liner, simply because I feel like with the gel liner it’s harder to do a mistake. With the liquid or the pen eyeliner you need to be very precise and careful. You never know how much product is going to come out and where it’s going to go, whereas the gel eyeliner is more controllable, because you’re the one deciding how much to get on the brush.

With that being said, let’s crack it on!

Step 1 – Prime and Contour the Eyelid

First thing that I always do is to prime my eyelids. It’s weird how my skin is dry as Sahara Desert anywhere on my face, but from my eyelids you could squeeze enough oil to deep fry chips for the whole family. So to ensure that my eyeliner is going to actually stay on my eyelids, I use the Urban Decay Eyeshadow Primer Potion in Anti-Aging. As a plus I keep my eyelids young as well.

After I primed, I like to use a powder to set the primer in place. You could use an eyeshadow close to your skin colour (Illamasqua Stealth) or any translucent powder (RCMA no colour powder). As a last step, before we move on to the actual eyeliner, I like to give my eyeball a bit of a shape, so for that I love to go with a warm tone colour just in my crease and make sure I blend the pigment out of it. You could use any colour or tone, I often like to opt for an orange undertone because it goes with my hair, such as Makeup Geek Morocco Eyeshadow.

Step 2 – Sketch out the Wing

Now that we have a nice base, we need to make sure that we’re not going to mess it up. Firstly, you need the right tools. My favourite eyeliner brush is the Zoeva 312 Detail Liner Brush with the Illamasqua Gel Liner in Infinity. I talked about these products in two different posts, so here are the links where you can find out why I love them both: brush and eyeliner.

Secondly, you need a steady hand. For that I would recommend to rest your elbow on the table and have a mirror in front of you. You want to look straight in to the mirror and with your eyes open try to draw a line that continues the curve of your bottom lash line. Don’t make it too long, cause you can always go back to it and retouch it. Now, you need to do exactly the same on the other eye, making sure you check the line already drawn, so you can make it even.

Step 3 – Draw a Thin Line across the Eyelid

The hardest part is done. What you need to do next is to draw a very thin line across your lid, starting from the tear duct area (inner corner) and ending it on the little wing you already made. It doesn’t look like much, but we’re getting there.

Step 4 – Draw a Little Triangle

Now we get a bit more geometrical and try to shape that famous little triangle. Start from the wing and drag the brush in a horizontal line until you meet the other liner that’s close to your lash line. Easy step: just fill in the triangle.

Step 5 – Perfect the Line

At this point it’s going to look like a winged liner, but maybe not the perfect one. So all you need to do is to make it slightly thicker and smoother. Pay attention to your eye shape. If you have small hooded eyes, keep it as thin as possible and quite straight, if you have big eyes with no hood whatsoever, then feel free to make it as dramatic as you want.

Step 6 – Line the Upper Waterline

A trick that I love to do and I think it makes a huge difference in the appearance of your eyes and eyeliner, is to tight-line the upper waterline with a black pencil or the same gel liner. It’s going to make your lash-line appear thicker and your eyes more shaped.

Step 7 – Finishing Touches

It’s time for mascara (didn’t apply too much, so you could still see the liner) and an inner corner highlight. For mascara I went with the Eyeko Lash Alert Mascara (my favourite at the moment) and the highlighter is Illamasqua Beyond Powder in OMG. I feel like the highlighter makes you look more awake and gives your eyes more of an almond shape, which goes perfect with the cat eye look. MEOW!

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