Disclaimer: I am by no means an expert in makeup, simply a curious Pinterest user with entirely too much time on my hands.
As a Pinterest enthusiast, I am always checking the Hair & Makeup feed to find new hair-do inspiration and makeup tricks. Lately, I’ve been seeing tons of tutorials for contouring and highlighting, and naturally I started thinking that I would be able to figure it out through the videos and instructions from beauty bloggers. I pinned a number of tutorials and here, I outline a comprehensive outline to how I managed to navigate them and figure out the best way to contour and highlight with my makeup.
The Products
I used this guide to determine which products I needed and what brands might work well. This article was particularly useful to me since my budget doesn’t exactly leave room to spend a ton of money on makeup that I’m using to experiment with a look I’ve never even tried before. When I tried contouring my face, I picked up all of the makeup in this tutorial at Target, and saved a bunch of money while still getting pretty good quality stuff.
I found the most important thing in perfecting this look is getting makeup that is exactly the right shade. As this tutorial instructs, you will need:
· A foundation that matches your skin tone
· A foundation that is significantly darker than your skin tone
· A highlighting concealer
· A beauty sponge
· Blush
· Bronzer
· Setting powder
This tutorial recommends NYC and Maybelline specifically, which are both relatively inexpensive. It also suggests getting a flat top brush for the setting powder, but I opted out of this and just used my regular brushes.
The Technique
I started with my face already having BB cream and concealer, since contouring and highlighting doesn’t necessarily account for the fact that normal people have blemishes they’d like to hide. From there, it took me a very, very long time and a lot of trial and error to get this down.
In order to figure out exactly what product goes where, I watched this video. It gives a really thorough description of every aspect of the process, and I found this much more helpful than the diagrams I’ve seen on Pinterest. That said, I used this diagram to figure out where exactly to put each product on my face.
The Advice
It took me six or seven tries to really get it right, so be patient! Here are my tips for each stage of the process:
1. My first mistake was actually in the first step: applying the foundation that matches your skin tone. I skipped over this accidentally because the video tutorial doesn’t explicitly mention it. But without it, the contour doesn’t work and will make you look like an oompa loompa. Apply the foundation evenly all over your face. This will help when you get to blending all the colors because it adds another layer of dimension to your skin.
2. The second step, highlighting, is fairly simple and gives you the opportunity to pick out the features you want to make stand out. With the highlighting concealer, make a triangle in between your eyebrows, and follow it all the way down the bridge of your nose. Next, highlight your chin. Finally, highlight under your eyes, making triangles that start just under your eye and comes to a point in the middle of your cheeks. You can also play up your lips if you want to by applying the highlighting concealer at the bow of your lips. Look at step three to see how I highlighted.
3. The trickiest part is the third step: applying the foundation that’s darker than your skin tone. The darker foundation is what creates the contour, and once you get it right, it looks awesome. Take the foundation stick and trace very thin lines along your cheekbones and jawbone. Then make marks on the sides of your temple. Finally, make lines on either side of your nose. Take a look here:
The reason this is so tricky is because applying too much or too thick of a line will end up bronzing your whole face instead of adding depth. The first few times I tried, I looked like I’d been in Jamaica for a week—and not in a good way. I found that using the edge of the foundation stick instead of using it flatly helped make slighter lines. And, you can always add more if you want!
4. The fourth step is blending it all together. Take the beauty sponge and start blending all the colors together on your cheeks and forehead, but avoid your under eyes (that comes later). You will start to notice the shadows once everything is blended together. If you feel like you’re just spreading bronzer all over your face instead of subtly evening your skin tone, you probably used too much foundation for the contour. Wash it off and start over!
5. In the fifth step, add blush to your cheekbones and powder bronzer (not the foundation stick!) onto your cheeks and temples.
6. For the sixth step, take the highlighting concealer and apply it underneath the arch of your eyebrows. Then, add your eyeshadow the way you normally would. I personally waited to put on eyeliner and mascara until after the last step, but that’s your call!
7. Finally, take the beauty sponge and blend underneath your eyes and the arch of your eyebrows. From there, you can adjust your blush and bronzer the way you prefer it. Hopefully, you’ll notice the difference in the way the light hits your face compared to your normal makeup routine. But practice makes perfect, so don’t be discouraged if it doesn’t “feel” right. Once I got the hang of it, I was really happy with the way it came out:
Happy contouring!