I am always up for a good makeup hack, especially considering my beauty skills are decidedly average, if not below. So I tried the bobby pin eyeliner hack to see if it's as easy as it looks, because it appears to legitimately work.
Now, I've tried a bunch of eyeliner hacks in my time, from using a business card to the infamous spoon hack. Some were good and others were a disaster. Thus, when I stumbled across the most recent eyeliner hack doing the rounds on the good ol' internet, I knew I had to give it a try. As the name suggests, this new hack involves using a bobby pin to create awesome winged eyeliner. After using the likes of tape and a chopstick in an attempt at achieving the perfect eyeliner, I certainly wasn't phased by the thought of utilizing a bobby pin.
Personally, I find eyeliner one of the most trickiest kinds of makeup to apply. With one eye open and the other closed, it's difficult to see what you're doing and you've got to have a pretty steady hand and an artistic flair to keep that mischievous line on the straight and narrow.
So I tried the bobby pin eyeliner hack in the hopes that all my eyeliner dreams would come true and I would finally be able to master the art of liquid liner.
The Inspiration
On my cyber travels, I found a Seventeen article about the bobby pin eyeliner hack, where the Instagrammer featured uses a bobby pin and some liquid eyeliner to create a rad eye look. The Instagrammer credited Instagram account beautynmalia and it appears Malia (of beautynmalia) is the original inventor of this hack.
As you can see in the above video, Malia uses a bobby pin, liquid eyeliner, and a brush and makes this hack look super simple. I couldn't wait to try it!
The Tools
I had my liquid eyeliner and bobby pin at the ready and I was psyched to trial this hack. I don't normally use a makeup brush to apply my liquid eyeliner — I use the applicator it comes with — so I stuck to these two crucial pieces of equipment.
The Process
I began with a prepped face and bare eyes.
As in the video, I painted the end of my bobby pin with eyeliner.
And I was ready to roll!
I was a little bit excited at the prospect of never having uneven eyeliner again.
But, when I removed the bobby pin, I was left with this rather perplexing dot. So, I made sure to heavily coat the bobby pin on my second attempt.
This was the result.
It reminded me of a shark fin and I was slightly disappointed that my flick was pointing downwards, rather than upwards.
Ever the optimist, I thought I could rectify this situation when I finished it off.
How very wrong I was.
Sadly, it seems there is no hack in existence that can help someone like me, who is most likely the worst person in the universe at applying liquid eyeliner.
I mean, WTH?!
Things went from bad to worse when I noticed my eyeliner hadn't dried and had smeared onto my eyelid.
Just when I thought the situation surely could not decline further, I tried to rectify my mistake with a makeup remover wipe, making things nose dive deeper into the flames of Makeup Hell.
Here I am showing off my beautiful handiwork. I'm sure one day, people will see the beauty in this mess and everyone will wear their eyeliner like this. They're sure to call it, "The Phoebe" in my honor.
In a further attempt to salvage the situation, I tried to wipe off the smear from my eyelid and was left with whatever the heck this is.
I decided to cut my losses, seeing as every attempt to rectify the scenario was making things 100x worse. So I moved onto the next eye.
I repeated the same process and was left with this wedge. While this was definitely an improvement on my first try, it wasn't really the elegant eyeliner style I was going for.
I looked like I'd done my makeup in a car, without a mirror, in the dark.
Although, the second eye was much easier to "fix" and I managed to make it look somewhat "normal."
That was until I blinked and smeared it all over my eyelid. AGAIN.
This was the end result of my experience using the bobby pin eyeliner hack.
The Verdict
At the beginning, I had very high hopes for this eyeliner hack and thought to myself, "There's literally nothing that can go wrong."
After seeing the results of my horrendous efforts, I examined the bobby pin I used and realized it may not have been the best type for this hack; the end wasn't ideal as the top prong plateaued out and went parallel to the bottom prong.
On the other hand, a bad workman blames his tools, so this reasoning may have been my attempt at trying to console myself and feel better about how awful I am at eyeliner. However, a hack is supposed to make a process easier for the masses or those that aren't professionals in a certain field.
At the end of the day, if you're even slightly okay at eyeliner, I think this could work. It looks like a great hack that would be good for people who can draw un-wobbly lines freehand or stick to a template of sorts (AKA not me). It's a quick hack, so even if you try it once and fail epically like me, you won't have wasted too much time. Although I'd highly recommend you try it on a day when you're not due anywhere, just in case you really mess it up like I did.
My quest continues to find an eyeliner hack to suit my non-existent eyeliner application abilities. Well, one cannot be good at everything. Onward!
Images: Phoebe Waller
