The Stilleto Clique

Long before winged liner was a TikTok tutorial, ancient Egyptians were already perfecting the exact same shape.

The bold, winged eyeliner look people spend hours perfecting today has roots going back over 4,000 years, to Ancient Egypt, where both men and women wore dramatic eye makeup as part of everyday life, regardless of social class.

The signature dark liner was made from kohl, ground from a mineral called stibnite, sometimes combined with lead-based compounds like galena. Egyptians drew even, elongated lines above and below the eyes, slightly arching the ends outward, essentially the same winged shape still recreated in makeup tutorials today. Vivid eyeshadow, often in shades of green from crushed malachite, was layered on top, giving the eyes their instantly recognizable look.

It wasn't purely decorative. The kohl helped cut down glare from the intense Egyptian sun, in a world with no sunglasses, and the lead-based minerals in it are believed to have helped protect against bacterial eye infections common near the Nile's marshy environment. A study on ancient Egyptian makeup samples held at the Louvre found that the substances actually boosted nitric oxide production in human skin cells by up to 240 percent, a discovery that meant this "beauty routine" was also functioning as basic medicine thousands of years before germ theory existed.

The look carried spiritual weight too. Bold eye makeup was believed to offer protection from evil spirits and to help align the wearer with divine forces, which is part of why it appears so consistently across Egyptian art, statues, and even funerary objects buried with the dead.

Modern culture has returned to this exact aesthetic again and again. Elizabeth Taylor's portrayal of Cleopatra in 1963 reignited global fascination with the look, and it resurfaces regularly in fashion and beauty media whenever the ancient Egyptian aesthetic comes back into style, right down to the same saturated blue eyeshadow and precise winged liner first worn along the Nile more than four millennia ago.

What looks like a cutting-edge beauty trend today is, in reality, one of the oldest continuously recreated looks in human history.

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