Contouring

Contouring has been part of my makeup repertoire for a while, but my method was admittedly haphazard. Basically it involved swiping a line of bronzer in a diagonal line under the apples of my cheek. No good.

Since I love the look of a hollowed-out face (that sounds strange and terrible), I decided that I needed to improve my technique. On one of our WWT photoshoots, Alice recommended Kevyn Aucoin's sculpting powder for contouring. It's a matte brown color that works better for creating the illusion of shadows hitting your face than a bronzer, which often has orange tones...and is sparkly.

I visited Nordstrom with the intention of quickly popping in and buying the sculpting powder, but instead I was blessed by the contouring gods of having Johnny working that day. Basically, he CONTOURED. THE. EFF. out of my face. He even contoured my eye socket! It was glorious. I highly recommend visiting him at Nordstrom and getting the eff countoured out of your face if you are in Houston.

While doing some online researching so as to figure out how to better my contouring technique, I noticed that a lot of contouring tutorials can be confusing looking like so:

image from glamour.com

It's a good map for what goes where...but you're not really going to be just putting blobs of contouring and highlighting product on your face like so.

I thought that The Beauty Department had a great and simple tutorial for contouring and highlighting though (visit their post for the full tutorial):