Contour Face
Use Contouring and Highlighting to Subtly Enhance Your Features
It's surprising how often people don't realize how much of a difference contouring can have on your features. Contouring is a great technique that lets you to add subtle shadows to your face, enhancing your natural beauty and making your makeup look more polished.
It's important to always highlight and contour with natural colors, as other colors end up looking bizarre. Darker browns work best for contours, and lighter browns are best for highlights. If your contouring and highlighting ends up not looking natural, swing by your local makeup counter and ask for them to match you with quality contouring and highlighting products.
When contouring, try to think of the light striking your face from the front, slightly above head level. Darken or lighten your features as you see fit. Remember to smoothly blend everything, or else it'll come out looking blotchy and unnatural.
Thin your cheeks out by highlighting the top of the cheekbones and darkening the sides of your cheeks. This gives the appearance of narrower, more shapely cheeks by appearing as if light were striking the cheekbones more than the side of the cheeks. Apply a bit of blush to your cheeks after contouring to give them a nice rosy finish.
You can thin your chin by darkening the sides or lightening the middle of it, ensuring that you blend everything! Again, a narrow chin catches more light at the middle, so darkening the sides of the chin makes it appear narrower.
This same works with your nose. You can give the appearance of a narrower nose by contouring the sides of the nose and highlighting the center. The eyes can be contoured by darkening their outside corners, giving them a more intense look and seemingly pulling them away from your browbone.
This also applies to your forehead: You can narrow a broad forehead by darkening the outside edges and lightening the center, which gives the appearance that your forehead curves more than it actually does. Make sure to bring the contoured (darkened) edges close to the hairline, or else you risk breaking the contouring effect.
Finally, blend a bit of your contouring shade below the jaw and on the neck. Smoothly blending the edges of your face makeup prevents your makeup from looking mask-like and standing out from the rest of your body. This is important even if you aren't contouring the rest of your face, as far too many girls have face makeup that makes their face skin tone contrast with their neck and shoulders.
Unlike other makeup techniques, this should never be overused. Overdoing contouring will cause your face to look like a horribly overexposed photograph, so subtlety is paramount. If you find yourself in need of some inspiration, a quick search online for professional modeling shots can result in some great ideas as contouring is almost always used in modeling photography.
With practice, you can use highlighting and contouring to enhance your face in ways that many other makeup techniques simply cannot, subtly bringing out your best features and making you look like a model every time you go out!
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How to Contour Your Face - Makeup Tutorial
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