How To Contour Your Face for Beginners
Contouring is a way to apply makeup that enhances your features. It can hide dark circles under your eyes, make your nose appear to be a different shape, give you higher cheek bones or make your forehead appear smaller. The end result is a new look by enhancing your better features while covering up others.
Women can completely transform their look with contouring. The process can look a bit silly because your face looks like a zebra with all the stripes and light and dark patches of contour. But when it is finished, it actually looks great and can range from looking very natural to a completely transformed face.
The possibilities are endless. Try contouring before making a decision to have plastic surgery, since nothing is permanent. If you want to enhance a feature one day but do something else the next, all you have to do is wash your face.
The following tips from a beauty stylist will ensure that you make the best out of your contouring experience.
Use a color palette that comes with the shades of contouring that you will need for your face like Anastasia Beverly Hills’ Contour Cream Kit, which comes in light and medium. This palette also comes in a matte or a cream finish. If you have dry skin because of the changing seasons, you should use the cream, which will stay longer on your face after you moisturize. The palette comes with three colors to highlight and three others to darken. After playing with the color scheme, you can decide which highlights and darkeners you prefer.
You will need a contouring brush like the Sephora Collection’s Pro Angled Contour Brush #75. This brush has the perfect angle and right amount of hard bristles to allow you to blend nicely without having to use your hands and giving you that natural or very detailed look because can control how much the colors are blended or not.
Using a highlight color from your palette, apply it from the corner of your inner eye all the way to the top of your check bone, making sure to cover your under eye bags. This will cover all the dark circles and accentuate your cheekbones making them appear higher than they are.
Next, apply a highlight in the middle of your forehead making an upside down triangle between your eyebrows (the very middle of your forehead), a stripe from the top of your nose to the very, around the tops of your lip and another small triangle in the middle of your chin. This will help your nose look less pointy, your forehead to appear smaller and your lips to look bigger with the contrast of highlighted versus non-highlighted skin around those areas.
To complete the contrast from the highlighted parts of your face, you will need to darken the areas around the highlights to have the contrast complement the highlights and have a cohesive look.
Apply the darker shade across the top of your forehead. The stylist said that you can do a large lowercase letter “n” from one ear across your forehead to the other ear. This will contrast with the highlight in the middle of your forehead, which will make your forehead appear smaller, allowing you to focus on other parts of your face that can be enhanced, such as your cheekbones and eyes.
The same goes for the highlights you put on your nose and check bones. You will want to draw a dark stripe one each side of the highlight stripe on your nose then darken your cheekbones by filling in around the highlighted areas. Again, this will make sure your features are enhanced and will place focus on those areas.
The key to contouring correctly is to make sure you are blending everything appropriately or you could appear to have a cartoonish look and appear rather silly. That is why it is important to have the right brush that can do the job well.
When you are finished, apply a finishing spray so that your work will last. The stylist recommended using Supergoop! Defense Refresh Setting Mist SPF 50. It will set your makeup in place and also provide shine control along with sun protection, so that you can wear your makeup worry-free of smudges whleprotecting your face from from the sun’s harmful rays.
Born and raised in the DMV, Emma Blancovich has a big appreciation for discovering things to do around town, such as new restaurants to try and supporting the local music scene by attending live shows. During the week she is an editor for trade associations, but on the weekends you can find her hiking up trails with the latest fitness gadgets then getting ready for a night out using the latest beauty and health products.