Or, to be fair, it’s more drag makeup cateyes than Instagram cateyes. Anyway, I finally convinced myself to practice cateye makeup after telling myself (and buying a couple of e.l.f. eyeliners for practice) that I need to do it to get better with the cateye. Because I have shitty hand-eye coordination and, if you noticed on the BBA Instagram face, my eyeshape is… asymmetrical. Basically, they’re not twins.

When I went to Sephora for my birthday two years ago, I asked the Sales Rep to do a cateye on me because I wanted to know how to do it. While she did a demo, she remarked that my eyelids were shaped differently – she was able to do a cateye seamlessly on my right eye but my left eye proved to be quite troublesome. My eyes are hooded but the skin layer on my left is more prominent than on my right – and I think it’s partly due to that stye I had on that one way back when (it runs in my dad’s side of the family).

If you follow BBA on YouTube, you’d be wondering why I haven’t taken the time to film a quick video and upload it. Surely, I have the time to practice an eyeliner and post about it here, so why can’t I film and upload too?

Fair point – but I don’t want to make a video that feels “forced.” If I’m going to make a video and upload it, I want it to showcase my effort and personality 110%. I don’t want to film just because I felt obligated to or got bitched to doing it – people can tell if you put your heart and soul into what you do and if you’re just pulling one out of your ass. Not to mention my place is a mess at the moment, along with other life situations simultaneously happening (getting inspected because someone decided to violate the renters’ rules in my building, work, moving).

To get back to the main point, I decided to do cateye the way it’s done on YouTube and Instagram after my numerous failed attempts to do it my way. Ironically, doing the YouTube/Insta method proved to be far easier to do and it actually got me the cateye finish I wanted.

But then when I closed my eyelids to see if the lines were symmetrical or straight (which is ironic because I mentioned earlier that my eyelids are the opposite), I didn’t like what I saw: most of my eyelids were covered in eyeliner and would cover any eyeshadow that I would have done. And if my eyes were open, you would never really see any eyeshadow – just the thick lines of eyeliner along my upper lashline.

With that epiphany, I either have to do one of the following:

1. Foreswear eyeliner because of what I learned today.

   or

2. Figure out how to do cateye that ISN’T drag style. Which is funny because when I did cateye without the heavy lines on the lids, it wasn’t working out well.

It sucks that just when I finally found a cateye technique that works, something else has to be sacrificed for it. I could just do the corners of my eyes.

And another quick check at my handiwork added another issue: oily frickin’ eyelids. I see that familiar shine and I already know that the e.l.f. eyeliner is done for. And no, waterproof eyeliner is not the solution because the enemy of any makeup is oil. Waterproof is not the same as oilproof. The most I can do is hold off the oil with e.l.f’s undereye makeup setting powder.

That’s right: I used a setting powder made for undereyes on my lids. After I used primer. Seems counterintuitive? Not really. My eyeshadows survived 10 hours of my aunt and uncle’s Silver Anniversary in the South. 10 HOURS (from when I put the makeup on until calling it a night). And this was in September.

Have you ever had any cateye mishaps? How’d it go? When did you find the right cateye technique for you, or maybe it just didn’t work?