I’ve been wearing makeup since I was 12, and I honestly hadn’t changed my beauty routine much up until about a year ago. For the longest time, my makeup routine looked the exact same:
(in this order)
1. foundation all over
2. powder
3. eyeliner
4. mascara
Sure, there were some tweaks sometimes, like adding eyeshadow when I wanted the look to be a bit more smoky and dramatic and the occasional dusting of bronzer all over to try and make it look like I wasn’t as fair-skinned as I actually am.
But the variation was minimal.
Later on, I tried a lot of pretty intense makeup routine stuff, like major contouring using bronzer, four different eyeshadows at a time, intense lipcolor and eye makeup at the same time, etc.
But in about the last year or so, I’ve really hit on some little tweaks that have made all the difference in how I feel after putting on makeup—I feel like although these things are small, they have streamlined my routine and made me feel I have enhanced my features to their full potential.
Here we go:
1. To minimize time spent on actually doing my makeup, I pull everything out of my makeup bag that I’m going to be putting on that day. Above would be my selection for a date night or a day when I want to look more put together. For a more natural, quick look, I would eliminate all of the eyeshadows. It sounds like such a small thing to just pull out everything you’ll be using before you start, but it seriously saves me so much time (and stress) having to hunt through my bag for the one thing I’m looking for. And when I’m finished using one product, I put it right back in the bag so I can visually see how much I still have left to apply.
2. I used to hardly invest any time in making my skin look good and just focused on defining my eyes (since they seem to get the most attention anyway), but I’ve since changed my ways–I now spend double the amount of time on my skin as I do anything else, and now I feel like my features have a nice “backdrop” that enhances rather than dulls the rest. Like I said before, I used to just do foundation and powder and that was it. Here’s my routine now:
-foundation on ruddy areas (forehead, cheeks, nose, and eyelids)
-concealer under eyes, on the side of nostrils (and underneath), and chin
-matte powder to set everything
-bronzer under cheekbones, on temples, and across forehead
-blush on apples of cheeks and down center of nose
-highlighter on tops of cheekbones, browbones, and the inner corners of my eyes
I don’t go too extreme on the whole idea of contouring unless I’m really dressing up, but even just slightly using some of the same techniques to accent my cheekbones gives my face a lot more structure than it appears to have with only foundation and powder.
3. When defining my eyes, I don’t neglect to fill in my brows anymore. I have pretty strong eyebrows on their own, but those few little extra strokes of a brow pencil really bring the attention to my eyes even more. It took me awhile to get used to my face with a stronger brow, but now I love the effect.
4. Here’s a recent trick I picked up: when putting on mascara, feather the strokes up and towards your nose rather than out to the outer edge of your eye. Since slanting my lashes ever so slightly towards my nose, I’ve noticed that I look MUCH more awake and that my lashes appear much more defined than they used to from slanting them the other way.
5. For eyeliner that stays put all day, I trace the tops of my eyes with liner (sometimes the bottoms too, if I’m looking for a more dramatic look), and then I follow up the liner with a smudging of black eyeshadow right over the liner line. I do this pretty much every morning, and it ensures that I don’t have to reapply eye makeup again before going out at night.
What are some of your best beauty tricks for looking your best in a hurry?
