Spotting one of the best eyeliner pencils at the department store or drugstore is about as easy as spotting a cloud in the sky on a rainy day. Nearly every beauty brand offers one, but they're not all created equal. Tracking down an especially great eyeliner pencil can be as hard as finding a Hinge match who's not lying about their height.
There are countless ways to use eye pencils, but no matter what, Houston-based makeup artist Rose Siard sticks to a specific technique: "As soon as you draw your line, start smudging," she says. "I work one eye at a time so I have more blending time." And of course, the pencil you choose either makes this easier or harder to do.
Luckily, Allure editors and professional makeup artists have done the tough testing for you. We gathered up the best eyeliner pencils in one convenient place, with picks from brands like MAC, Revlon, and Gucci, plus drugstore eyeliners that look and feel just as vibrant and smooth as the rest. Consider this your shopping guide for the most colorful, long-lasting, shimmery, and intensely pigmented formulas on the market. All are easy to use, most are easy to smudge, and none of them will play a disappearing act on you until they're ready to wipe off with some makeup remover before bed.
Keep scrolling to find out which one of these eyeliner pencils you should be rimming your lash lines with, using to draw on graphic shapes, blending out as an eye shadow base, or trying the latest liner trend with.
I promise I didn’t make a mistake in the title of this post :) Have you ever seen pictures of eye makeup looks and wondered ‘why doesn’t my black eyeliner look that intense?’. If so, this post will help you choose the correct shade of black eye pencils for the looks you want to achieve…
When it comes to colors (in makeup in our case), we know that each color comes in many different shades and tones; some are more vibrant, some have different undertones etc. When we say “black”, we automatically think there’s only one shade…black. However, this couldn’t be further from fact – especially when it comes to eye liners in particular. And here’s how to check the difference:
For the purpose of this ‘experiment’, I swatched 2 popular black eye pencils from MAC and 2 popular eye pencils from Urban Decay. The pencils are from the same line of each brand so the texture and the formula are exactly the same. It’s just the color that we’re testing out to see how black pencils vary in shade and tips to how you can compare the intensity when shopping for a black eye pencil.
Left to Right: MAC Smolder; MAC Feline; Urban Decay Zero; Urban Decay Perversion
As you can see in the swatches above, although every single pencil would be considered a rich black if swatched on their own, obvious differences are highlighted when swatched side by side. These differences can become even more apparent during application.
Starting with the 2 MAC pencils, Smolder on the left was the very first rich black pencil I purchased (or so I thought at the time). It’s only after I got the shade Feline that I realised Smolder was in fact more de-saturated in color. It also made sense why everytime I tried smudging Smolder, a gray/green’ish undertone would appear. Feline however is a true rich black and the color stays exactly the same when blended out.
The Urban Decay pencils are also similar. The shade Zero is a great everyday black but it is definitely not as intense as Perversion (which is a shade more comparable to MAC Feline). Zero almost has a dark brown undertone compared to Perversion and this is highlighted further when smudged.
I reach out for MAC Smolder and Urban Decay Zero for my daytime looks, whereas I know I’ll get a super rich application with MAC Feline or Urban Decay Perversion for more intense looks.
The best way to ensure you get your desired shade and intensity when it comes to purchasing black eye pencils is to swatch them side by side and smudge them – as I did in the pictures above. Whichever swatch applies creamy and opaque, stands out amongst the rest of the testers and the color stays the same when you smudge it (with no other undertones showing through), it’s safe to say that pencil will give you the most intense black eyeliner application. You can even do the swatch test with the black pencils you already have at home, to see how they compare ;)
I hope this post was helpful in how you can check for different intensity of black eye pencils and make your purchase (or use them) according to the results you’d like to achieve ;)
What is your favorite rich black eye pencil? xx