Highlighting and Contouring

Highliting and contouring is a part of corrective make up. Highliting is what it sounds like: a bright colour. Bright colours help to emphasize certain features. Contouring is using darker colours. Darker colours help to tone down certain features. When doing corrective facial make up the first step is figuring out what shape your face is. Just pull back your hair and take a look in the mirror and try and compare your face to one of the faces in the picture. The ideal face shape is oval. When applying corrective make up to any other face shape you have to highlight and contour to make your face look more oval. If you have an oval face this information is useless to you because you don't have to do anything. I have mostly an oval face but my forehead is kind of square so I correct my forehead when I do corrective make up. Firstly you want to use cover up to cover any marks or blemishes on your face. You have to think back to the colour wheel from art class for this. When dealing with red marks or blemishes you have to use a green coloured cover up because they are opposite to each other. If you are trying to cover any purple marks you will need to use a yellow cover up. Apply a small amount to the marks and rub it in with your finger because the natural oils in your hand really help the cover up do it's job. Next you will need to choose two colours of foundation. One must match your skin tone and the other must be one shade darker. When choosing a foundation, test on your jawline and whatever colour fully disappears into your skin is the one you will need plus a colour that is one shade darker than that one. Next you need to picture an oval over your face shape. Ask yourself what is missing and what is too much. Any part of the face that is too big to fit inside the oval will be contoured. To contour you will use a small amount of the darker foundation on the spots where you  need it for your particular face shape. Then you will go over with your foundation as per usual. This will cover up the dark son you don't look silly but you will still be able to see the shading effect of it which will make your face seem much more oval in the end. After I apply foundation I usually apply a powder but this is not something you have to do. Powder is just nice because it gives more of an air brushed look and it helps to hold the foundation on your face and hold any other make up you may put on top on your face as well. It also helps to dry your foundation. Translucent powders are always best to go with because then you avoid being orange. If you want a colour to your powder make sure it matches the colour of your foundation. Next you will use blush to highlight. Keep in mind if you are going to wear any kind of lipstick or lipgloss that you want your blush to match your lip colour. It doesn't need to be a perfect match just keep light colours with light colours and dark colours with dark colours. Any part of your face that seems to be to small to fit in the oval needs to be highlighted. I'm including a picture example because this is kind of hard to get a feel for without it. The x represents contouring and the slashes represent highlighting. I hope to upload a video of the application of full corrective make up by next week. This picture is above as I could not get it to move. Eccentuating your cheekbones also looks great. Just use a rouge blush and brownish blush. Apply the rouge blush from the middle of your eye and about halfway down your nose all the way back to your ears and then undearneath you can do the exact same thing with the brownish blush and that will contour and sculpt your cheekbones making them really pop out. If you have any other features on your face that you think are too big or too small then this can also be applied to that. For example if you think you have a big nose then you could put a darker colour of foundation on your nose before you applied your actually foundation. It's really simple and easy and can be used every day to look even more fantastic than you already do.

Enjoy! :)