Walk into any pharmacy in America and you can find eyeliner. That’s true of any halfway decent grocery store as well. I haven’t looked, but I imagine even the 24/7 bodega on the corner near my apartment would have more than one option. There is a ubiquity to eyeliner that is easy to overlook, in the same way we overlook wearing shoes. It’s just something we do when we leave the house, or even do when we’re home alone.
Two decades ago, Salt, by Mark Kurlansky, set a standard for cultural history written through the lens of a critical but often overlooked, civilization-defining subject. Eyeliner might hold a similarly important role, or at least that seems to be the argument made by Zahra Hankir in her new book Eyeliner: A Cultural History. Hankir lays out her thesis one vignette at a time, spanning ancient Egypt to modern Bollywood, from Bushwick, Brooklyn to Tehran, Iran. Over three thousand years of history, she examines the place eyeliner holds in society.
Hankir prefaces the book with the start of her personal relationship with eyeliner as a teenager in South Lebanon, and her displacement to London because of a fifteen-year-long civil war. It is in this time she first encounters Queen Nefertiti, she explains, in her father’s collection of National Geographic magazines, and it is with Nefertiti where she begins the eyeliner story.
Ancient Egyptians relied on kohl, an eyeliner sourced from natural materials like soot. Hankir helpfully includes a glossary at the start of the book to bring neophytes like myself up to speed with the lexicon. Nefertiti is our entrance into the story, not only because the Egyptians preserve their rulers in decorated beauty, but because of the symbol of beauty her bust had on the modern world when her bust was unearthed and passed around in grand exhibitions. Throughout Hankir’s book, Nefertiti is the unifying theme which she regularly returns to link the disparate sections.
The queen was an important part of marketing modern eyeliners in the 20th century, and she serves to link to the past and present, as well as a beauty transcending racial boundaries that, for much of the 20th century, were firmly entrenched. Nefertiti helped makeup companies sell products, and “by 1985, most American women wore eyeliner, and the product had become so popular that some opted to have their lines permanently tattooed onto their eyelids.” Hankir does a spectacular job of raising the stakes and setting up eyeliner as this culturally powerful and iconic practice, all tied back on Nefertiti.
The narrative then moves to Chad, in the Chari-Baguirmi region and the Wodaabe, an ethnic group where the men “flaunt their beauty as they perform for their potential partners.” In one way, this shift is a great way to introduce men wearing eyeliner and acknowledge that the book will not solely focus on women. Later too, Hankir talks about drag performance, and the use of eyeliner by men in context of queerness.
However, when Hankir is discussing the Wodaabe, there is a distance to the narrative voice here that comes across as though she is writing for the National Geographic magazines where she first saw Nefertiti. The narrative voice seems to wander toward the realm of curious outsider, an objective observer, while elsewhere there is a greater intimacy with the subjects. When Hankir retains that more intimate perspective, the narrative comes easily, such as when she focuses on Miehina, a thirty-four-year-old Geisha performer in Japan. The book is at its best with details from individuals, and much of the story is told through hyper focused examinations on the subjects. The technique excels at contextualizing eyeliner and its impact on those communities.
Each chapter of the book highlights a new place and a new subject or subjects. Hankir achieves a wide scope, from Asia to Central America and in between, and while the Middle East and central Asia may be over represented, the story does get around the globe. However, the breadth of the narrative, and the reliance on these individuals means the actual narrative is far less cohesive than it could be. Hankir is not telling the grand story of eyeliner, but rather the individual stories of many people and the importance of eyeliner in their lives.
The personalized nature of the narrative is epitomized by Shirin Neshat, an Iranian who now lives in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Born before the Iranian revolution, her life is materially impacted by the regime change, and eyeliner is part of that. Hankir observes “the way she (Nashat) presented herself to the world then developed in part as a reaction to living away form Iran, in exile.”
Through each of these chapters too, Hankir appears to be pointing to how eyeliner impacts culture in different ways. There is commentary on class and race and politics and gender through the lens of eyeliner. Hankir doesn’t always manage to link these ideas together except through Nefertiti who reappears regularly throughout the book to tie the different elements together. She binds the many different elements together, but it’s a rather thin link. I’m still left wondering in some cases how eyeliner came to play such pivotal roles in some many disconnected civilizations.
Hankir’s book is easy to read, and draws the reader in through the personal stories of her subjects. In this sense, it’s a book that succeeds in telling, if not one story, then many stories, about a utilitarian, symbolic, and essential practice that transcends cultures around the world.
NONFICTION
Eyeliner: A Cultural History
By Zahra Hankir
Penguin Books
Published November 14, 2023
