Contour & Colour Wheel

It seems that contouring is making it's way into more women's makeup routines! For good reason. 

There are a blessed few that have this particular look without makeup, thanks to amazing genetics, and bone structure.  However it's always nice to enhance and compliment what we've been already blessed with.

Note that of course it's a good idea to take a trip to your local M.A.C., Sephora, Murale, etc, and have a professional makeup artist find the correct contour colour palate for your skin complexion. 

Below is a facial diagram of where exactly you should be placing dark and highlight contour.  The idea is you want to bring the middle of the face to focus, and create the illusion of "sharper" facial features. The dark contour allows for those areas to appear smaller or recessed, again allowing the focus to be near the centre of the face...where all the action is! 

You don't have to take it all the way to the collar bone, however if your wearing a strapless dress, it can't hurt!

The key to anything like this, where colour contouring is involved, or even eyeshadow application, is always BLENDING! it is a rule! no exceptions. Especially with contour, you literally want to blend the colours into each other, without compromising where you've deposited the colour.  There should be no obvious lines or breaks in the colour of the makeup, it should look like it's all you baby!

It's best to use a blending brush for best results, with light pressure. I even like to use an angled or flat foundation brush. The soft angled brushes allow for easy blending and helps keep the shades where they're suppose to be.

I also thought it would be helpful to add a colour wheel.  Often women ask me about my eyeshadow, and they always say one of two things, either they don't know how to put it on, or don't know what colours are safe for their eye colour and skin tone so with a colour wheel you can see precisely what colours go with what!

The key to reading a colour wheel is simple.  Where ever your eye colour is on the wheel, directly across from it is your complimentary eye colour!

These colours have less dimension than eye colours but it's the same idea.  Also brown eyes are paired with shades of black, although blacks and charcoals make brown eyes look lighter, brown eyes can almost wear any eyeshadow colour especially if you have a medium/medium-olive skin tone. Blues, purples, greens, yellows, and pinks will all look great on you!

These are some basic colour match combinations, however like I mentioned with brown eyes, or shades of brown the possibilities are endless, you can wear almost all of these shades, I would only suggest be careful with yellows, especially if you have a yellow undertone. I would suggest staying closer to the gold spectrum.