The Five-Minute Everyday Eye

Five tools, five minutes, the same order every morning.

Five steps Five products

Spoolie through the brows before anything else touches your face, hairs pushed up and slightly out, no product on the brush. Thirty seconds. Doing this after the eye is finished is how you end up redoing the eye, and doing it wet is how you end up with four hairs standing at an angle nobody asked for.

Product Spoolie

Clear brow gel over the brushed shape, one pass upward, then leave it alone while it dries. A tinted gel is a different decision on a different morning; on a Tuesday the shape is the whole job. If the gel is stringy on the wand, wipe the wand on the neck of the tube rather than on your brow.

Product Clear brow gel

A matte taupe or a warm beige on the blending brush, swept across the lid and taken just into the crease, then stopped. Sixty seconds. I have said elsewhere that I gave up my blending brushes, and I did — I gave up three of them and kept this one, which is the honest version of most minimalism.

Product Blending brush

Angled brush pressed along the upper lash line in short stamps rather than dragged in one stroke, working from the outer third inward. A fingertip smudge is faster and I use it most days; the brush is for the mornings when the line has to survive a dinner. Either way the line should suggest itself rather than announce itself.

Product Angled brush

Three squeezes with the curler — base, middle, tips — on clean dry lashes, five seconds each, no heat and no pumping. Then two coats of mascara on the upper lashes and nothing on the lower. Curling after mascara is how lashes break, and the third coat is the one you will spend the rest of the day managing.

Product Lash curler