Easy on the Eyes

You may not always get perfect penmanship marks when you try to outline your eyes, but that could be because you’re not using the most obvious, and latest, tool to hit the eye makeup market--an eyeliner pen.

Don’t scoff. After all, if eyeliner pencils never made you laugh, then why should eyeliner pens ? This hypo-allergenic device, whose tip really resembles that of a felt-tip pen, is put out by such companies as Revlon, Maybelline and Aziza and usually sells for about $5.

“It gives you more control in a liquid eyeliner,” says Ruth Goldsberry of West-Val Pharmacy in Encino. “And eye pencils can be too hard on a dry lid . . . you can’t control the line, it smears. With the pen eyeliner, you can get a fine line or a thick line. It’s selling well.”

Goldsberry says the product is popular with women of all ages, although she says: “I have told the older ladies not to try and draw with it. ‘Don’t try to draw a straight line,’ I say. ‘You have to overlap, stop and start.’ Because the older ladies have crepey lids.”

At the Dana Drugstore and Boutique in Burbank, cosmetics saleswoman Ruby Gallick says some young women are so pleased with the inexpensive product, that they’ll buy handfuls at a time--in different colors such as black, brown, teal and blue. But, she admits, some older women--crepey lids or no--won’t try the product at all. “They’re such creatures of habit at that age, they won’t try anything new,” she says.

One young woman who likes the “Sixties, Cleopatra look” and using eyeliner pens around her eyes, “without the mess of the old liquid stuff,” confides that this new product has broken her of a bad habit. “I have, in the past, used a felt-tip pen when I’d run out of eyeliner and I was in a hurry,” she confesses. “This kind of eliminates the need for that.”