The eyes have it: Fountain pen inspires beauty product

London – Cult cosmetics brand Le Métier de Beauté, which launched here in June, looks outside of traditional beauty packaging to develop its product line. One example of this lateral approach to product design is its unique quill-tipped eyeliner.

‘I don’t have great handwriting, but I loved what it looked like when I wrote with my fountain pen,’ Le Métier de Beauté president Joanna Vorachek Austin says. She subsequently wondered if this thinking could be applied to make-up application and, in particular, to the tricky process of applying liquid eyeliner. She asked a fountain pen designer to develop a pen for Le Métier de Beauté’s eyeliner that would emulate the distribution and application of ink in a fountain pen, right down to the cartridge in the barrel. The result is an eyeliner with such application precision that one make-up artist has described it as being ‘like using a Sharpie’.

Le Métier de Beauté’s Precision Liquid Liner is a brilliant example of a product problem solved by looking beyond the conventions of the sector and into other industries where the solution may lie.