This Eyeliner Will Send Your Favorite Pencil Into Retirement — Where It Belongs

As a Jersey girl, there are two parts of my beauty routine that I will not compromise on: my self-tanner and my eyeliner. But seriously, when it came to my eyeliner choice, I always shot low in the price department. After all, there's really no difference between the go-to department store brand I swore by and the high-end stuff you can only get at Sephora. So what's the point of chalking up 20 big ones when you can get the same thing for $3, right? Wrong. So wrong.

As a lifelong skeptic of the much-more-expensive products, especially when it came to your run-of-the-mill things like eyeliner and mascara, I always wondered why people wasted the money. A pencil is a pencil, after all. So when the POPSUGAR senior beauty editor slid a sleek tube of Tarte Maneater Self-Sharpening Eyeliner ($20) across my desk and said, "You definitely look like an eyeliner girl," I was intrigued. She hit the nail on the head with my guilty pleasure, so I agreed to test it out.

Tarte Maneater Self-Sharpening Eyeliner

From

$20

$20 at tarte cosmetics

I decided to give it a whirl while getting ready for work the next day. And as a person who wants her morning beauty routine to clock in at five minutes or less, I was impressed immediately. Sitting right next to the beauty department, I hear an awful lot about the importance of packaging and overall function when it comes to products — full disclosure: I never knew what they were talking about until the very moment I cracked open (well, unscrewed, if you want to get technical) my first self-sharpening pencil from Tarte.

While the leopard-print packaging definitely caught my eye first thing (hello, I'm from Jersey!), my favorite part was the screw-on cap. I cannot begin to tell you how many times I've misplaced the cap to my old eyeliner and still kept throwing it in my makeup bag anyway. The point would totally crumble — which means sharpening every time I wanted to use it — and it would get dirty from rattling around in my bag all day. Yuck.

I also discovered something that can only be described as pure magic to an eyeliner fanatic such as myself: I didn't need to apply midday anymore. Between commuting and sitting at a desk with my eyes glued to a screen all day, I had a daily 2 p.m. appointment with the bathroom mirror to fix the black mess of eye makeup that had made its way down my face by that point. With the Maneater liner, that became a thing of past. No wonder it's more expensive: you need so much less of it to get you through your day. The silkiness of the actual pencil itself is also an added bonus (read: no more fishing out black specs of liner that made their way into your eye socket).

The bottom line? If you value your time and a solid, high-quality product, then this eyeliner is money well spent. As far as my former eye pencil goes? I hope it enjoys a nice long retirement in Boca Raton, FL, or at least, somewhere you can forgo the self-tanner.