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Thursday 2 January 2014

Contouring & Highlighting for Beginners. (Stage 1)

Contouring the face can make a huge difference to your appearance. This method adds different dimensions to the face and can accentuate your best features. 

Contouring involves three main stages, highlighting, contouring and blush. However, in an attempt to keep the information overload to a minimum I thought I would blog about these stages separately.

This blog post is all about highlighting!

Highlighting can help to bring attention to a particular area on the face and can help to achieve more pronounced features, such as your cheekbones. You should aim to target areas that the light naturally hits. 

There are five main places that people tend to highlight on the face.
1. Below the eyes. This makes them 'pop' and works beautifully with a dramatic or smokey look. This can also help to eliminate dark circles underneath the eyes. If this is something that you particularly struggle with then I recommend using a salmon colour highlighter because that is particularly effective at cancelling out bags. 
2. Below the brow line and centre of the forehead.
3. Above the Cupid's bow. This accentuates the lips and enhances their shape. This effect can also be enhanced further by adding gloss to the centre of the lips to make them appear significantly fuller.
4. The highest point of your cheekbones.
5. The nose. This is a really useful method when trying to create the illusion of having a slimmer nose.

Highlighters come in both powder and liquid form. I tend to use both, depending on the look I am aiming to achieve. However, I would recommend using a liquid highlighter for a night out because they last for a longer period of time in comparison to the powder which seems to sink in to the skin more.

When applying the liquid, pat the product in to the skin rather than rubbing it in as this can remove the foundation from the skin.

The high beam highlighter by Benefit is amazing. (£19.50) Click HERE to view this product.


Contouring is also a hugely popular technique amongst celebs! Take Kim Kardashian for example, her beautifully sculpted face has been cleverly contoured to magnify her facial features. I have chosen this picture below because I think it demonstrates perfectly which areas of the face require highlighting.



Just remember, as with everything, practice makes perfect! So it may take you a couple of attempts to really get to grips with where on your face needs highlighting but keep at it and you'll get there!

Let me know how you get on with it! Lots of love, Kenzie xxx

1 comment:

  1. Great post!...i am a dancer and have always had makeup artist do my makeup. But now im am going on tour and will have to do it myself.... :-O
    Is it a good idea to blend the highlights and contours for stage of leave the face looking patchy?

    ReplyDelete