Distorted Priorities : How to: Contour & Highlight

Hi loves!

I hope you're all doing okay! I know it's unusual for me to post on a Sunday but I really wanted to get this post up this week because I have a lot of material coming up for you! Yesterday morning I was out shooting for upcoming posts - you can see sneak peeks on our Instagram - more to follow!

For today's post I wanted to do something slightly different. Basically, I was inspired to do this blogpost because of my friends. Shoutout to Rebecca, Jessica & Julia! A couple of weeks ago we were all getting ready for Julia's 20th birthday and as I was doing my contouring and highlighting I noticed my friends staring at me blankly trying to figure what the heck I was doing! Rebecca asked me how do you know where to highlight and where to contour and why you do it! After I explained it to her, I realized that it's actually a really good idea to prepare a blog post with the answers to all these questions. So today I will be answering all of your questions, if you have any other unanswered questions feel free to comment down below! Let's get started!

What you need:
1. A fan brush for highlighting
2. Soft angled brush for contouring
3. Contour shade (two shades darker than your skin tone) whether it is liquid, cream or powder
4. Matte & Shimmer highlight whether liquid, cream or powder

I personally use powder as I feel it is easier to carve out your features and you can easily fix any errors you make but I will list alternative choices of cream and liquid contour & highlight. I suggest buying a contour & highlight palette and although you will not use all of the contour shades for contouring I sometimes use the shades that are too dark for me as eyeshadows and therefore I would have used every single shade.

Before we start with all of this it is important to note what shape your face is: heart-shaped, oval, square ect. I found this really good article from Cosmopolitan about how to highlight & contour for different face shapes - I will link it at the bottom of this to see what is your face shape and which is the best way to apply all this.

I have quite an elongated face so the method I use is for those that have similar face shapes as mine however the steps are the same throughout.

Why do we contour & highlight?
We contour to create a more sculpted look. Therefore, we'd be playing with creating shadows and minimizing the appearance of the area. For instance by contouring the sides of the nose, we can make it look slimmer. We usually contour our jaw-line to create a structured face shape (always), our forehead (depending on the face shape), the side of our chin (depending on the face shape) and on the sides of the nose. Aditionally you can also contour at the bottom of your lips to make them appear bigger due to the shadow you'd be creating. Basically, imagine you're a drawing a figure of the number 3 on your face - the first bump being your forehead, second bump being your jawline and third bump being the sides of your chin - this is where the light would naturally hit you.

For highlight we're going to do the complete opposite of contouring. We are going to be adding light to the areas and making them look bigger. For example applying highlighting on the cupid's bow to make your lips look fuller, the bridge of your nose and on your cheek bones.

Tip: On your cheek you need to have a sequence of highlight on the cheek bones, blush right below it and the contour on your jawline.

I asked Jessica to help me demonstrate all this and hopefully you can get an idea of what I mean by all this. I took a couple of photos where I placed the brush where it needs to highlight/contour and then applied contour/highlight in the appropriate areas NOT blended and then blended afterwords so that you'll get an idea of what you'll have to do.