Tutorial: Winged Eyeliner for Hooded Eyes

Hey friends! Today’s post is a first for me…this will be my first attempt at a tutorial! And of course I pick one of the things I’ve always had the most trouble with….winged eyeliner. And because my eyes are hooded/partially hooded, it makes the process even more challenging.

For those who may not know, a hooded eye is where the fleshy part of the skin under the brow covers up all or a portion of the eyelid. When my eyes are completely open and I’m looking at myself straight on, the moving part of my eyelid is covered by the skin from above. My eyelid isn’t totally covered, but often when I wear even thin eyeliner, you can’t see my eyelid at all when my eyes are open.  So I would say my eyes are partially hooded.

I’ve watched quite a few tutorials about winged eyeliner (some specifically for hooded eyes) in order to get ideas of what different techniques people like to use. I often find myself dissatisfied because a lot of the times the technique is “just draw the winged part like this *draws perfect line with no reference to placement* and then fill it in.” Really? That’s it? For us hooded eye girls, we know that drawing a simple diagonal line going from the edge of the eye toward the eyebrow tip or based on the lower lash line doesn’t necessarily cut it because when our eyes are open, the hood cuts into the wing so it either looks crooked or you can’t see it at all. So I wanted to attempt to show you with as much detail as possible what has been working for me and my hooded eyes!

Please note that this whole process is totally dependent on your own eye shape. One hooded eye is not the same as the other. Like I mentioned before, my eyes aren’t totally hooded, but are definitely partially hooded at the least. But I do hope that this may be helpful overall, and I’ll try and explain as best I can!

For this look I used the Physician’s Formula Eye Booster 2 in 1 Lash Boosting Eyeliner and Serum in the color Ultra Black which I did a post on quite some time ago.

I often like to start with the wing itself. The most important part of this to me is WHERE to draw the line. I like to reference two points which I’ve marked down below. The first is the lower star which is simply the point at the outer corner of my eyelid. The star above it is where my hood ends. The key for me is keeping the wing UNDER the line created by these two points. Because if I put it above this line, my hood will intersect with the wing and make it wonky!

I usually don’t make single dot alone as my first step, but I just wanted to show you where I’m starting. I usually draw in the wing shape all at once which I show below (that’s why all of these photos are Step 1.)

Aside from making sure the wing is under the two starred points, something else I’ve found that works well for me is to make the wing shaped slightly curved instead of a straight, diagonal line. That helps keep the wing under the hood.

Here I have drawn a slightly curved line under the two points I marked earlier starting from that little dot I marked. Think of it as a very shallow U shape. Don’t worry if it’s messy at this point! Cleanup time comes later.

Below are the stars again so you can see that I’ve tried to keep the whole wing on or slightly underneath those points.

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Step two is to simply draw a thin line across your upper lash line.

Step 3 involves the wing. I start from the red dot on the right (on the wing) and draw a slightly curved line towards the inner corner stopping at about the middle of the eye. This creates an open shape (which sadly I forgot to photograph) like a triangle which you then just color in with your liner.  I keep the line curved because I’m still trying to keep the whole wing somewhat under those two star points I keep referencing. As you can see, the red dot on the wing isn’t exactly at the very end tip of the wing. Keeping it lower is better and it’s less likely you’ll cross the hood line. You can do this in multiple steps starting even lower on the wing than I did. Start out with tiny, thin lines going back towards your eyelid and then build up as you need.

It definitely looks a little odd from above! But I feel that with any technique used for hooded eyes, you will end up with a somewhat odd shape when you look down at it. But the point of this is to look good from straight on.

Step 4 is to thicken up the whole line slightly mainly focusing on the eyelid. I’ve carefully taken the liner and gone over the whole shape making it a little bit thicker everywhere and and also making it more even to cover those messes from earlier. You can certainly make the line on the eyelid thicker but I didn’t want to cover up my whole eyelid when my eyes are open.

The photo below doesn’t look too much different from the odd shape a couple pictures above, but I do think you can see how I’ve made the line thicker on the eyelid and tried to clean up any patchy line work.

You may be able to see below how the placement of this wing could drag the eye down a bit (the wing is pretty low on the eye and even goes a little bit below the lower lash line.) But I often prefer this technique to fiddling around with trying to get a higher wing unless I’m wanting a super bold and thick liner. And honestly, when your whole eye look is done, no one is going to notice that. If they do, they’ve got too much time on their hands!

So there we have it! I really hope this was helpful and made sense! I’d be happy to answer any questions about this process and as always, thank you so much for reading 🙂