Here's What You Can Substitute For Eyeliner

Ever have one of those mornings when you oversleep, you're out of coffee, and when you go to put on eyeliner, the pencil tip breaks off and you can't find the sharpener anywhere? Or, maybe you left the cap off your liquid liner and when you go to define your eye, it's so dried out that it feels like you're stabbing your lids with a blunt crayon?

Fortunately, skipping the look of a lined eye isn't a scenario you have to wrestle with if you have other basic items in your cosmetics case. The easiest way to substitute the look of eyeliner is with eyeshadow the same color as your usual eyeliner and an eyeshadow brush. Just dampen the brush and use it the same way you would eyeliner (via Fustany). This idea is seconded by wanderingbeck on the MakeupAddiction sub-Reddit: "I use a brown eyeshadow and kinda press it into the base of my lashes and when I'm done with that it looks like a smokey liner."

You can use your mascara to line your eyes

Prefer a sharp wing or a dark, defined line to the more subtle smoky eye? If you've got a mascara tube and a thin brush, you've got all you need. Glide your makeup brush carefully along the mascara wand to pick up the color and then apply the brush to your eyes the same way you would with gel eyeliner (via Women's Health). P.S., the cool thing about eyeliner and mascara is they can pretty much serve as each other's back-ups in a makeup emergency — you also can use eyeliner when you can't find your mascara!

There's one item in your beauty arsenal that you should never, ever use in place of eyeliner, though, even though it looks almost exactly like an eye pencil: your lip liner. Even a dark brown lip liner that's almost the exact same shade as what you use on your eyes is forbidden. That's because lip liner contains additives that are not meant to be used near the delicate organs that are your eyes. 

"Using unapproved colorants around your eye could even lead to blindness," cosmetic chemist Randy Schueller told Allure. "Colors intended for use around the eye have to be specially approved by the FDA."