Reviving creme eye liner

Yesterday when I reached for my ELF creme eye liner in metallic olive, I was dismayed to hear a rattling sound from it's container, and sure enough, when I upended it, the eyeliner simply fell out of it's packaging. What's curious though is that for the most part, the liner was not dried out, and I could still use it. Since I was short on time I used it, and resolved to come back later to find out how to fix it.

I have several of ELF's creme eye liners from the studio line. My black and midnight (blue) colors I've had close to a year now, and gunmetal and metallic olive I've had for about three months. I distinctly remember though, that upon receiving all of the liners, all of them were at least a little bit pulled away from the jar (plastic) already. Only the blue and the olive seem to have changed in pulling more away from the sides of the jar though, although there was already space all around the liner in the first place, I suppose it was only a matter or time..

Now, having heard and read of numerous horror stories of how gel and cream eyeliners and shadows have the tendency to dry out, I felt like I should do something, even though for the most part, the liners felt and acted, more or less the same as when I first received them. A larger contributing factor though, was that knowing that with more surface area exposed to the air in the jar, no matter how tightly it is sealed each time, the more likely they are to dry out. Every time the jar is sealed, the amount of moisture in the air in the jar, and with the product exposed will attempt to reach equilibrium. So say you live in a dry climate, you would be releasing moisture every time you open your jar, and your product would dry out even faster. With one of the liners so separated from the jar that it fell out, it was time to do something.

Basically what I did for the olive, was first take the piece of eyeliner out. I then took my hairdryer and set it on HIGH, and heated up the plastic jar. When the plastic was adequately warm (hot, but not burning, not so hot as the liner starts to melt), I took the liner, and pressed it into the small remnants of eyeliner in the warm jar. I then took up the hair dryer again, and pointed it towards the top and the sides of the open jar, with the liner inside. The point of this was to warm up the liner and the jar. Then using my ring finger. I pressed out and down from the middle of the liner, until most of the space between the liner and the jar was sealed. This is the only one of the liners, that kept most of the shape that it was originally in, but at least most of the air surrounding the liner was sealed, and I could see the color pressed up from the outside of the plastic.

The process with the other three colors was a variant of the same procedure. The difference mainly being that these liners had not yet fallen completely out of their containers. Heat was applied to the bottom, and the sides of the jar, and then the top. The blue and black liners, being older, were understandably harder where they had been separated from the jar. For those two I took a clean toothpick and broke up the creme, and mixed it with more application of heat until the product was smooth, although still not melted. I then gave it a few hard taps on the countertop until I was reasonably sure I had forced out a majority of the air bubbles, at least those that I could see. The tapping was applied to all of the liners, but the black and blue were the only ones I felt I had to mix, the reason being that only heat and pressure was not enough for force the liner back to the sides of the jar.

For now, they are cooling in their pots, with the lids on. I will test them tomorrow to see how well the products fared, but for now, I am hopeful and reasonably sure, that they will work as they should.