How to do Eye Makeup for Monolids
Hi my ladies and theydies, my name is Stephanie and I am an experimental makeup artist behind @stephs_monolids on Instagram. I am a proud monolid-lover, but that wasn’t always the case! I am now a young woman in my 20’s and I just graduated university, but growing up, I hardly found any Asian makeup artists in the media whom I could look up to.
When I did find East-Asian artists like Michelle Phan and Jenn Im, I still couldn’t relate to them fully because they had double eyelids. I felt alienated and extremely, extremely frustrated, because I also am the only one, the singular one in my whole family with monolids - the recessive gene really popped out there.
Makeup tutorials geared towards Western beauty and those with double eyelids only added to this frustration. It wasn’t until my junior year in college when I picked up my brushes and approached makeup in an artistic, fun way. Until then, I always believed my bare face was less than, and that I needed makeup to feel pretty and presentable. F that!
After that day when I finally decided to use makeup in a different, creative light, I was liberated and started going to class in a full face of colorful makeup, like full-on avant-garde for a casual day of classes. But in NYC, no one cared, so I didn’t either!
Via @stephs_monolids
Via @stephs_monolids
Honestly, I could have gone even crazier with the makeup, but that’s growth baybee!!
It took me years to learn to love myself and all my natural features and to finally understand that it is a gift to have my eyes and all this lid space. Comparing yourself and your features to others and whatever trend is “in” at the moment will only result in a cycle of insecurity and vying for validation from external sources.
This is cliché, but there are so many people and personalities in the world; we need uniqueness and individuality in looks and demeanor, because makeup isn’t just superficial. Makeup is a means to become whatever and whoever you want, to be seven different styles each day of the week, or to practice art on a different medium. If you, my lovely person reading this, are struggling with monolid makeup, or are learning to love your East-Asian eyes, or just want to learn some tricks for makeup in general, here are five tips for monolid makeup!
1. When doing a cutcrease, don’t do it on the actual crease, but place it slightly above. Because of our monolids, everything we do in the crease will be lost when we open our eyes, so it has to be a visual illusion when applying makeup.
Cutcrease is just slightly above the crease.
Cutcrease is at halfway point of the lid.
2. For winged liner, follow the angle of your lower lash line, or use a point on your face for the angle of your winged liner. For example, if you follow the angle of your nostril as a starting point, the wing will be super fierce, whereas using the middle of your nose as the starting point will create a straighter wing.
3. For the inner corner liner extension, follow the direction of your lower lash line or the upper lash line at the tear duct, and create a little triangle, or you can keep it as a thin straight line.
4. For general eyeshadow placement, we are blessed with a lot of lid space. Where you place your color is a personal choice, and what I like to do is place the eyeshadow to ⅔ or ¾ of the lid and blend out the color to my brow bone. Or, for a more subtle look, pack the color close to the crease and diffuse it upwards to fill out the lid with your blending brush.
5. Don’t be afraid to experiment with graphic liner! Because we have more than average lid space, the composition of the face allows us to be really detailed and go crazy in this area to draw attention to your eyes, while not going overboard. Here is some inspo from my favorite monolid makeup artists:
In tip number three, I mention an inner eye corner extension which some people refer to as, the fox eye. Made popular today primarily by supermodel Bella Hadid and Euphoria superstar Alexa Demie, the fox eye is the usage of shadows and/or liner in the inner and outer corners to make the eyes appear more lifted, slanted, and almond-like in shape.
Prior to this however, this style and technique was also popular in the 1980’s and 1990’s. I don’t see the harm in this technique as it is using makeup products to alter or give the illusion of a more sultry, edgy, fierce eye, comparable to a variant of the cat-eye. To use whatever products you choose to shapeshift your features into the form you like is quite literally the point of makeup. However, what I do have an issue with, is the pose accompanied by the fox eye of pulling at the temples to further accentuate the elongated eye.
Bella Hadid, Alexa Demie, Emma Chamberlain, the Kardashian/Jenner family as a whole, and James Charles are just a few of endless non-Asian, high-profile celebrities who pulled the pose numerous times. It is truly baffling to me as a first-generation East-Asian American that the thing I was teased most about growing up has now become trendy and commodified by those who were/are perpetrators of this very form of ignorance.
Trends come and go, as they are cyclical every ten years or so, and thankfully POC have been very vocal about the hypocrisy and offensive nature of the fox eye trend. In turn, discourse these past few months helped educate many about why this trend isn’t completely harmless. I am encouraged by this and believe that holding these people accountable who have influence over literally millions of people is the way this generation creates the change we wish to see to create an inclusive, transparent, and safe space for us and future generations that celebrates and respects one another.
Written by Stephanie Zhang
Header Photo by Jamie Street via Unsplash
