Is anyone else consistently disappointed to find that they don’t look good in a cat eye? Here I have come to convince myself that wearing one is both a mostly universally flattering makeup maneuver, and a very easy one to execute on your own, but if I can’t look good in one, well, what hope is there for the fate of the relationship between my face and makeup?
To settle what was perhaps the most perplexing conundrum to close my 2017, I called upon Charlotte Tilbury‘s Pro Artist, East Coast, Mia Jones, to troubleshoot anything I may have been doing wrong. And you know what I learned? That I’d been drawing my g-dang lids on backwards. Here I thought it was best to start at the end of your lids (and look, for some people that trick works), when really, starting from the inside corners of your eyes yields better results (particularly if your eyebrows take up a substantial portion of that region of space).

Or does it? I’m too distracted by my shiny-ass wrist to look at my eyes. But if you, like me, fall victim to the wrath of sucking at makeup application, have made some version of a resolution to not look like a dying turtle for the duration of this winter and recognize that just because sometimes you don’t like to wear makeup does not also mean that you don’t want to know how to best apply it if and when you do wear makeup, here is a handy tutorial in slideshow form that explains how to get the perfect cat eye at home in an undisclosed number of steps (fine, five, with an optional two) that say rawrrrrr when prompted but never wooof because, you know, cat eyes, people. Not dog eyes.
Photos and gifs by Edith Young.