For decades, makeup experts have stressed the importance of using your ring finger — the most delicate finger — to blend in makeup around the eyes, the area with the thinnest skin on your already very sensitive face. After trying this tip for a few weeks, I realized the dark circles under my eyes had noticeably faded, but this didn’t stop me from using my whole hand to rub my eyes whenever I wanted to.
There’s just nothing quite like it!
While applying makeup well requires a gentle and precise touch, rubbing your eyes when they’re itchy needs something much more powerful. In a perfect world, I would relieve any itching on or around my eye with my ring finger as well, which is what many healthcare professionals and dermatologists strongly recommend. However, we don’t live in a perfect world, and if I tried to scratch my eye that way, I would never stop scratching my eye.
At the end of the day, satisfaction is what matters most — even more than the full beat I might have just spent a full hour perfecting.
Unfortunately, a lot of beauty techniques arise from personal sacrifice. I still reapply my lip-gloss/liner combo after eating a meal, touch up my hair after getting caught in the wind, and reapply concealer throughout the day. However, I do all these things because they don’t involve leaving an itchy eye to keep itching for hours on end.
There are certain things that I simply can’t sacrifice, like going through the day wanting to scratch my eye until I finally get home.
It doesn’t always ruin my look either — sometimes it elevates it! If I started with a clean, sharp eyeliner wing, later it could be a smokey eye! Or if I did a sparkly and colorful lid, later I could have an entire face of glitter! And if I just applied concealer, who cares! Being a ‘tired girl’ with under eye circles can also be very chic sometimes.
Beauty and fashion are constantly evolving, so why can’t my makeup look evolve throughout the day too?
However, even though I will never resist hitting the spot by rubbing my eye with the full palm of my hand, no matter what, I am still committed to applying my makeup with my gentlest finger, the way I’ve done it since I watched Michelle Phan do it in her YouTube tutorials from 2011.
