Some basic eyeliner safety tips: Don’t put it on in a moving vehicle, don’t use it to write “Kick Me” on someone’s back, don’t swap pencils with your friends in an effort to expand your color palette and/or your microbiome, wash your hands before putting it on, don’t sharpen your pencils with the same knife you just used to dice raw chicken.
And maybe, think twice before using eyeliner too close to your eye. This is the recommendation of a very small pilot study recently published in Eye and Contact Lens Science and Clinical Practice, which found that particles from eyeliner could contaminate the eye—more so the closer it is to the eye’s surface. A logical conclusion, but a notable one for this preliminary attempt to confirm it scientifically.
The waterline—a beauty term, not a medical term—is the line of skin between the eyelashes and the eye. This is what it looks like. And the study showed there were more particles in the tear film when eyeliner was drawn on the waterline.
Small as this study is, the researchers concluded that “it would be beneficial to advise patients to reserve the application of eyeliner pencils to anterior to the lash line.”
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