bigger, brighter and more beautiful
Eye make-up tries to do three things: firstly, to make the eye bigger- to open to window wider into the unfathomable mystery of soul; secondly, it aims to make the eye brighter, to add to its sparkle; thirdly it is used to decorate lashes and brows- thogh te meaning of this painting is open to interpretation.
Theophile Gautier sums up this triple aspect in a single sentence: "Eye-paint is much disapproved:but those painted lines lenghten the eyelids, define te curve of the eyebrows and bringout the brilliance of the eyes, like the finishing touches that a painter might give to masterpiece."
The trilogy ("enlarging, brightening, decorating") is a reccurent theme. According to Haafer, "Indian bayaderes paintthe rimsof their eyelids black with tschokko tschaai, a mixture of which the main ingredient is antimony. This paint makes theit eyes look very bright, and bigger than they really are."
The arab world at the end of tthe first millennium, the eyebrows were painted with with a decorationof wasma, a sort of indigo; the eyes were enlarged with Ispahan kohl, applied with a little ivory stick.
Roman woman used to make their eyes look bigger by drawing a dark line under them with fuligo, a lampblack obtained from varios fatty, aromatic substances. In Byzantium, it was fashioable to have thin eyebrows, dyed black, and black eyes enlarged with kohl made from the incomplete carbonisation of various fatty plants. 
Eye make-up intended to make the eye look larger is fairly clear- cut, but eyebrow-painting is open to interpretation.In China, the fashion which consisted of shaving the eyebrows off to paint new ones on in blue or black ink lasted for twelve centuries- if that can still be called fashion! In the first century B.C., they were painted in the shape of upturned  "V"s, and in the first century A.D. they became curves that extended halfway up the forehead.
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