Contour And Highlight

In this video I demonstrate how to shape your face by contouring and highlighting.

For the contour color you should choose something several shades darker than your natural skin tone, usually a grayish brown taupe. The gray is important because we are trying to replicate natural shadowing. This contour can be a powder, a cream, or even liquid foundation. I usually use a pressed powder or a cream contour color. This should be applied to areas you want to diminish or recede, like the hollows of the cheek, or the sides of a wide nose (or jaw) and to shape the eyelid. You should try to roughly stick to your natural face shape and contours, it's easy to subtly exaggerate your natural face shape, but very difficult to completely change the shape when you don't have the bone structure to back it up. Nonetheless, it's pretty amazing what can be achieved.

The magic comes when you add highlights to backup the contouring. The highlighting color should be several shades lighter than your skin tone. Very pale slightly orange tones seem to work best on fair skin, whereas yellowish golden olive tones work better on darker skin. The highlight should be placed where you want areas to protrude, or pop out. This will normally be the cheekbones, the ridge of the nose, the brow bone, the ball of the eyelid, etc. There are many areas you might want to bring out a little, like the chin, just above the bow of the lip, the forehead, even a little dot in the center of the lower lid just under the lash. Blended well and working together, contouring and hiliting can be a powerful tool for beauty. There is so much more to contouring than simply shaping your cheeks.

The crooked nose bonus is just for fun, but it is good practice to play around and see what can be done. And it would work in reverse; if you do have a crooked nose, you can use the same technique to straighten it.