Fail: elf Waterproof Eyeliner Pen

I guess the old adage still stands: you get what you pay for. When you spend $2.00 on an eyeliner pen, don't expect the world. I have a deep love/hate relationship with elf products. Some of their items have been awesome and a great value, and others I wish I hadn't wasted my time or money. This particular item falls into the latter category. 

I had high hopes for the Waterproof Eyeliner Pen. Some great reviews on YouTube put the idea of it into my head, and it gets about 4 out of 5 stars on the elf website. It's billed as a waterproof and smudge-free liner, which is important when much of the time I am looking through a camera and my eyeliner smears all over the place. I chose the shade Midnight because it looked more navy than black, and I have more than enough black eyeliners. And a felt tipped eyeliner pen seemed perfect for me, a person who is terrible at applying eyeliner and has had pretty good luck with the liquid pen type in the past. So I took a shot and ordered it, along with a haul of other things (and thanks to retailmenot.com, free shipping!).

I was so excited to rip open the package and try it, but the second I took a look at the tip, I knew this was a no-go. The tip looked so dry! The little fibers sticking out of the point didn't have an ounce of liquid on them. When I tried to swatch it on my hand, the tip was indeed dry, barely eking out a bit of color. Plus the pen was so stiff it almost scratched my skin! Thank goodness I didn't go right for the eyelid. Hoping that the liquid might just have been blocked from the tip during shipping, I recapped it to put it tip down to get the juices flowing. The back of the package states "Best stored tip down for ultimate color saturation," but the cap end is rounded and will not stand up on its own! Why suggest storing it tip down, but then make the packaging incapable of standing tip down by itself? So two strikes so far.

Notice the curvature of the cap, that's not going to stand up!

I left it alone for a while, propped tip down between two bottles of lotion, and hoped that when I reopened the cap that the tip would look a bit more saturated. But alas, this was not the case. I decided to play with the eyeliner anyway, and attempted to gently swipe it across my lid. OUCH. The tip was outrageously stiff and it actually hurt! One pleasant surprise was that it left a much more pigmented line than I had anticipated. Until, that is, I went to repeat the process on my other eye and it was a faded, pale line. I had to draw over the line about three times to match the darkness of the first side (and thus three more times of painful swiping). Strikes three and four. In a ballgame, this guy would have been benched already.

My one last hope for this product was the waterproof, smudge-resistant, long-lasting power promised by elf. I let the eyeliner dry, and waited about twenty minutes before testing it out, more than enough time for it to set in my opinion. I went to the mirror and slightly touched my finger to my lid, and... smudgy mess! The tiniest touch took my nice thin line to an ashy, thick line that honestly looked like a big bruise. Smudge-free, I think not. Deep down I knew that if it was this easy to smudge, it was impossible for it to be waterproof, but I didn't want to leave any stone unturned. I put a bit of water on my fingertip and touched my unsmudged eye, and as I thought, the second the water hit my skin the eyeliner ran like it was being chased. Strikes five and six, this guy shouldn't even be playing the game.

So this is going straight into the fail bin. If I had spent more than a couple bucks on it, I'd be making a much bigger stink with elf customer service. But as I said, you get what you pay for. Skip this one, ladies!