“Call time is 2:30 p.m. so I need to leave by 1:45. Minus 2 hours, 11:45. That’s when makeup starts. Which means eyeliner at 12:15, max. Hair at 1:15.”

I never found myself to be the kind of person who plans their day minute by minute, but when it comes to getting ready for a dance performance, there has to be a plan. At the center of the plan is eyeliner. That jagged line that used to demand a whole 30 minutes for itself; for doing and redoing. Spent looking in the mirror, sighing, tearing a makeup wipe in half, wrapping a piece around my nail to fix the line, only to smudge it worse and end up wiping it all off.

It’s funny how, whenever I open up my Photos, and scroll through my old performance pictures, I can see myself growing up: maturing, through this stroke of black ink across my eyelid. 

In 7th grade, during a photo shoot, someone helped with my eyeliner, both above and below the eye. I hated it up close; the thick lines looked too heavy, like I had a black eye. But then I saw the photos. From a distance, my eyes didn’t just look bigger, they looked alive. You could see my smile through my eyes. Looking back, I now see what eyeliner can do for a dancer: it wasn’t about looking pretty up close, it was about being seen.

Since that photo shoot, starting in 8th grade, I insisted on doing my own eyeliner. Though my “wings” looked shaky and uneven, as if the eyeliner succumbed to the grooves of my eyelid, refusing to flow smoothly along it. Both the top and bottom lines were the same thickness, which only highlighted the unevenness. During my first international performance, I recall frantically tearing a makeup wipe to fix one wing, believing I had cracked the key to fixing the unevenness. Instead of fixing it, I made it worse, much worse, smudging the top of it in panic, leaving me with thicker lines and wings staring back at me in the mirror.

After countless such performances, and nearly mastering that simple line above the eye, I found myself searching for a secret to control the chaos of the wings. Enter tape, my new comrade in the search for sharp, reliable wings, achieved with only occasional assistance from my other friend, the makeup wipe. I remember vividly my first attempt at using it. Sitting criss-cross on the cold hotel floor, a roll of tape borrowed from the front desk beside me to the left and eyeliner on the other side. Carefully, I placed a 1.5-inch piece under my bottom eyelashes on both sides at an angle, uncapped my eyeliner, and started to draw, paying little attention to how much eyeliner spilled onto the tape. Pulling off the tape, I felt an immense amount of pride. Even though the two wings were at slightly different angles, I had pulled off two sharp looking wings with no assistance from anyone. Just me and my tape.

That sense of accomplishment lasted, until I started noticing how even the tape couldn’t guarantee perfect symmetry. I needed a new method, one that would let me guide the wings with precision. That’s when I discovered how much my own fingers could do, using them to follow the path of the tape intersecting perpendicularly, at the center of my nose, creating wings that truly felt balanced. Through these years of trial, error, and small victories, eyeliner has been one of my biggest outward indicators of growth. Each performance, each line drawn, is a reminder that growth comes in stages. The jagged, time-consuming 30-minute ritual of my early dance days has transformed into a focused, 10-minute routine, a small but meaningful measure of how far I’ve come. Makeup now starts at 12:15pm, ish.