Paula Dorf Smokie Lid Brush

I've got quite a list of makeup graveyard stories. everything from weeping over a discontinued shade to the more recent fiendish eBay hunts.

The worst of them has to be discovering a product that you absolutely know in your gut that would be perfect for you, only to find out that you heard about it a few months too late.  

Enter: Paula Dorf Smokie Lid brush -- I mentioned I'd be telling this story earlier this week.

I'm a typically Asian person with very little eye definition -- the flesh of my eye is quite flat from my brownbone to my lash line, so I need a little colour to help define my eye area and help me look more awake and less puffy.  The way most people need to put on their brows or apply mascara -- I need eye contour.

Til now I haven't been that picky with my eye brushes.  If you've been with me long enough, you'll recall very old videos where I could do everything I needed with an old Aveda flat shader brush.  It was a simpler time.  Now it's almost embarrassing to admit exactly how many brushes I have that are almost-not-quite the same as each other -- every size of crease/lash/liner/shader/blending brush that I've never imagined anyone needing.  Spoiler alert: you don't need all the brushes.  Save yourselves and your wallets.

After a Lisa Eldridge Marathon one day where she highly recommended the Paula Dorf Smokie Lid brush, I knew I had to have it.  Never mind the extensive Google Image search that came after, even just seeing it in the video made me absolutely certain beyond all else that I needed it in my life.  It was like no other eye brush I'd seen before -- short, stubby bristles that didn't look like they could cover much ground.

I found a tester in a random beauty store in Toronto. After two sessions of negotiating and pleading, they wouldn't sell it to me.  Maybe I tried too hard?  And having used it for a few months now, how could I not -- it is exactly dense enough to pick up an intense, but workable amount of colour, yet just tapered enough to really focus the pigment in the lashline and diffuse it.  I've used it to thicken up eyeliner, contour underneath the eye, for my inner-corner highlight, contour my outer V, everything I've ever needed to alter my eye shape.

Anyway, Tod gave it to me for Christmas.  I don't ask questions, but mine actually has the word Tester engraved into it.

Image: Paula Dorf Smokie Lid brush pictured with the eye products I've been using lately.  Ain't no texture this baby can't handle.