Gel Eyeliner & Mascara are probably two of your beauty product sthat get dried easily because of the nature of the product. In general gel eyeliner usually get thrown out after 12 to 24 months depending on the brand and quality of product, whereas mascara will be good for between 6 to 12 months.

Lets start with the easiest one first- mascara, what do you do when it becomes too clumpy and dry? I read a really good tip from a magazine once, dump your mascara to a glass full of hot water when you start applying your skin care. By the time you reach for your mascara it will have melt and easily used as before. The only problem is that you need to do it every time you want to use the mascara because warming it up will dries the mascara faster. What you can do to prolong the life of your mascara is try not to push the wand in and out in repetitive motion when you want to apply it, I’m sure many of us does it unconsciously. It will trap air bubble into the tube hence it wills dries the mascara.

Now the hard part – gel eyeliner, they have superb staying power, the right product to draw perfect line, but one minor problem which is it just dries off really fast! If you forgot to close the cap properly, the next thing you know it’s  becoming really hard to draw any line at all with the gel eyeliner. I usually make sure that I close the cap real tight, and whenever I used the gel eyeliner I will put the tub facing down to the table to make sure that the product gets as less contact with air as possible. Once it dries on you, here’s a couple of tip that you can use to resuscitate your eyeliner:

1. Use the mascara method and dump the whole bottle into a hot water until it melt down a bit. But of course since gel eyeliner consistency is much thicker than mascara; it wouldn’t really help when your eyeliner has dried off completely. If it’s just beginning to harden than you can try this.
2. Or with method no 1, you threw the whole lot – gel eyeliner pot thrown in warm water – to the microwave and heat it up. Start with 10 seconds using just the same amount of watts that you usually used to heat up your food. If you feel that it’s still hard try to gradually add 10 seconds until you reach your desired consistency. I wouldn’t suggest going beyond 60 seconds or you’re going to go overboard with the gel eyeliner and have it cooked well done.
3. Glycerin do wonders to drying gel eyeliner, put three drop of glycerin into your gel eyeliner pot and heat it up in the microwave for 30 seconds with the lid open then the gel eyeliner will become  like mousse consistency momentarily and that’s when you need to stir up and mix the gel eyeliner with the glycerin. You can use a toothpick to do the stirring. It will help for up to 4 weeks than you need to do the whole routine all over again.
4. For the most practical solution I would opt for the cleansing oil as my medicine. Dip your clean brush in cleansing oil, just a little bit not too much just enough on the tip and start to brush your brush onto the gel eyeliner and you can see how easily the gel eyeliner – even the really hard one – get transferred to the brush. Apply the eyeliner as usual but don’t close your eye lid straight away, you must wait until it dries for about 20 seconds and it will settle nicely. The only drawback is that the gel eyeliner will not have the same staying power as before but it will not smudge easily either. The color will fade a little bit at the end of the day. I have dry lids so I wouldn’t know how this will work on oilier lids but it does deserve a try. Some people used glycerin instead of cleansing oil, but cleansing oil still does a better job.

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