DIY: Reviving Dried Up Cream Eyeliner.

Gel and cream eyeliner for me is one of the best makeup product for eyelining. Pencil liner, regardless of quality smudge on me, liquid eyeliner? I wish I have steady hands and I always managed to transfer the liner to my upper lid. So gel/cream liner is the only thing that works for me.

Typical gel/cream eyeliner packaged in jar with very large opening. The opening cause moisture in the product evaporated and we're left with dried up liner. Any gel or cream eyeliner will dried up, it's just matter of time. Even MAC paint pot dried up in its glass jar. There are even cases when the eyeliner arrived to the customer dried up (this happens a lot with Coastal Scents gel liner)

There are few tips on preventing gel/cream eyeliner from drying up

1. Keep in glass jar. I don't really know why, but I keep hearing people talking about how gel or cream product in glass jar didn't dried up as fast as the one in plastic jar.
2. Cap the jar tightly.
3. Store it upside-down.

At times, even with all those prevention measures, the eyeliner still drying up. That's what happened to my ELF Studio Cream Eyeliner. I had it since June/July and boy, it actually shrink significantly since it starts drying up. The eyeliner become harder and harder, and I had to swirl my brush and waste so many product to make it soft enough to line my eyes. I'm not willing to throw it away. So I take out some and mix it baby oil, it become creamy again, but it smudge terribly. I wanted to try using MAC Fix+, but then I have to go out and buy one.

And then, one day, an awesome makeup guru uploaded a video in YouTube and it's the very video that I need to revive my eyeliner! Koren aka EnKoreMakeup come up with a way to revive gel eyeliner, so I thought it might work for cream eyeliner too. Go and watch the video, you'll see what a genius Koren is :) In the video, he explains what actually happen, how to solve the problem and share some useful tips.


After I watched the video, I was too excited to try it, but I don't have any product that he actually used in the video. So, I have to postpone it. Luckily, I thought of using Clinique Dramatically Different Moisturizing Gel. Why? Because it contains a few different silicone derivative, glycerine and it's in gel form. Everything that I need to revive my liner in one product!

Number referring to picture below:

1. Dried up cream liner - can you see how it shrinks away from the jar wall. It's hard and I have to really swirl my brush to soften it up.
2. I add about 4 pumps of Clinique DDM Gel [pic 4]. And the I mix the DDM Gel and liner and heat it up hair dryer.
3. It would turn out to something like this.

If you didn't heat the mixture long enough, the liner will smudge/transfer [pic 5]. So, heat it up a bit longer (make sure it doesn't boil), until the liner melt and mix nicely with the DDM Gel. In pic 6, you can see no smudging and the liner pigmentation is still good.

I had tried my eyeliner few times after I revived it. It works well, just like when I first started using it. The pigmentation is still good, it doesn't smudge and long lasting.

Hooray for Koren! Hooray for revived eyeliner! Hooray!!!