To Render the Eyes Brighter and Darker

Anyone else thinking of the Byron poem? Besides myself, and the 1824 author of this advice (who earlier referred to Byron as a connoisseur of fine eyelashes...)

Anyway, while looking for the burned cork information, I came across several references to using burned resin or mastic to darken the eyelashes and eyebrows. The most explicit instructions came from The Family Oracle of Health (1824), repeated almost verbatim in The Toilette of Health, Beauty and Fashion (1833):

To render the Eyes brighter and darker
Take an ounce of frankincense the same quantity of resin and pitch and half as much mastic. Throw all these ingredients upon a piece of red hot charcoal receive the fumes into a large funnel  and a fine black powder will adhere mix this with a little oil of Benjamin, Eau de Cologne, or what is perhaps better the juice of elder berries, and it is fit for being applied to the eye lashes or to the eye brows.

The later source calls for a plate rather than a funnel for collecting the product.

***
DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME

[I am not qualified to advise on how to do this stuff safely. What follows is my own experiment, which I am not recommending anyone follow.]

***
I mixed together:
1 oz frankincense
1 oz resin*
1 oz pitch (pine resin)
1/2 oz mastic (gum arabic)

*resin is a general class; the term is commonly used for by-products of distilling turpentine, basically pine rosin

The large pale yellow chunks are pine rosin, the orange stuff
is gum arabic, the frankincense is the smaller white solid.
The pine tar is the black liquid.

I then lit a charcoal fire (outside) and threw the mixture on it a little at a time. I used a plate on a trivet (raised above the fire on rocks) to collect the soot.

Holding the plate in the smoke proved untenable.

The different ingredients burned at different rate: the pitch went very quickly (and smelled awful), while the solid resins took longer to burn (the frankincense smelled nice). The mixture produced a great deal of smoke, but one of the solid resins tended produce more and darker smoke than the others.

The material deposited on the plate very well.

But it did collect a lot of soot.
The knife ended up being slightly more effective for scraping.

But it also ended up being 1) somewhat sticky, and 2) more of a smooth coat that a sooty powder. Scraping it off was a challenge, and produced very little usable, solid material. Basically, the soot stuck to anything that touched it--the knife, my fingers, etc.--except for itself. Not useful when I'm trying to collect a solid/powder.

Very low yield on the soot.

To use, I damped the soot with a few drops of Eau de Cologne (the 1859 receipt is still separating a month later). It made the soot flakes a little easier to move, but did not dissolve them.

Cologne I previously made, soot in gallipot (from Williamsburg),
applicator from Little Bits Apothecary.

I tried applying the soot to my right eyebrow and eye lashes. It seems to have had no effect. I'm not entirely sure that any actually stuck to my lashes.  Some did get on my eyebrow, but I don't think it was enough for a noticeable color change.

Not seeing a difference.

In conclusion, I won't be trying this again. It's much more expensive and labor-intensive than using cork or cloves, and produces negligible effects.