The Thing About Contouring

Makeup can’t magically transform you into a Giselle Bundchen lookalike or give you killer Karlie Kloss cheekbones...

Recently I've had a number of brides enquire about extreme contouring (à la Kim Kardashian!). Contouring and highlighting are one of the many specialist skills taught to well-trained professional makeup artists. In fact the technique has been around for donkeys years, but, extreme contouring is probably not the right look for your wedding day in my view.

Makeup is a great way of enhancing your natural beauty and features. Contouring and highlighting techniques are used to mimic the way light hits your face and where shade naturally falls. They should always be used together and applied delicately. When I work with brides I use this method in a subtle, understated way and after assessing the individual needs of each person.

I'm not a massive fan of extreme contouring in general, particularly on your wedding day. It can be a very obvious look, even to the untrained eye, particularly in natural daylight. Personally I think it has its place and is best left for TV or film where famous faces need to be very heavily made up for the demands of HD cameras.

A quick tutorial:

- To emphasize your cheekbones, first get to know the structure of your face. Use your fingers to find the bone and then the area directly underneath.

- Pick out a shade of foundation or matte eyeshadow a couple of shades darker than your skin tone.

- Start drawing a subtle line lightly underneath your cheekbone up to the dimples of your smile and then buff, it should look like a shaded area rather than a line.

- Make sure you then highlight the top of your cheekbone with a pearl shimmery eyeshadow or crème, this will help exaggerate them and frame your face.

I’d love to know what you think, leave your comments below on whether you want to recreate a strongly contoured and highlighted wedding day look?