If you're like me, you're familiar with the heartbreak of badly applied makeup. It started with 6th grade's cartoonish smears of electric blue eye shadow. In 7th grade, I had gooey cobalt globs in the corners of my eyes from my hopeless attempts with a blue eyeliner pencil on the inner eyelids. 8th grade brought cakey navy clumps where my eyelashes should have been.

Maybe, you say, there is a pattern here. But it's not just the blue stuff. As an adult, although I've long since forsaken the blue family, I'm still a retard with makeup. On a good day, I'll spend hours with an outline of old lipstick staking out the frontier between my mouth and the rest of my face. On a bad day, I'll have black Alice Cooper smears under my eyes and a red blur over what began as my mouth. A visit to the bathroom mirror last Thursday found me with mascara impossibly smeared across my chin. Whenever I wear makeup, I always have some of it embedded in my fingers from my futile attempts to control it from wandering around my face.

So I have a tough time keeping it in place. And forget it if it's hard to put on to begin with.

So for many years, I looked at the faces of my girlfriends around me and longed for a mastery of the most elegant of all cosmetics, liquid eyeliner. I tried. Lord, how I tried. But in the end, the results were always comical at best and usually tragic.

Until now. That's right, friends, now there's a liquid eyeliner that even the most ham-handed cosmetic failure can apply with ease. It's Almay's Amazing I-Liner, and amazing it is.

Let's start with the bottle. Instead of a tubular mascara-type bottle, Almay has borrowed the nail polish design. That means that instead of crusting up dangerously around the wand, the eyeliner stays at the bottom of the bottle, where it belongs. There's even a little shaker bead inside to keep it nice and liquidy. The lid (which holds the applicator) is about three inches long and tapered, giving you plenty to hold on to.

The eyeliner itself is perfect: thick and opaque without being globby (thanks to the handy shaker bead). It doesn't crumble off. And it dries quickly, a godsend if you can't hold still and usually end up with those lines in the crease of your eyes while waiting for it to dry.

But the real genius of Amazing I-liner is the applicator. Unlike the traditional thin, floppy brush, Almay uses a pointed, firm yet flexible felt-tipped applicator. No uncooperative brush to contend with. No struggling with the loose hairs that inevitably fall out and mess up your careful line just when you've finally gotten it right. The point where you start the line is narrow and perfect, and you can manipulate the tip to give you a gradually thicker line as you go. It's like using Sharpie on your eyelid!

Thank you, Almay, for letting me join ranks with glamorous steady-handed women everywhere.