Make up Melanie Christou
Editorial What’s Your Legacy
In this article I’ll talk about 4 ridiculously easy techniques you can adopt when doing your make up, in order to achieve professional and polished results. You might find them stupid and self explanatory, but believe me, in my relatively short life time I came across way too many women who do their make up in the most inconvenient, difficult and uncomfortable way ever. The best tips are the simplest ones sometimes.
Here are my easy techniques for great make up.
Lighting
I know it sounds silly but doing your make up in natural light or evenly distributed artificial light that resembles natural light as close as possible is 100% the way to go. If you are not blessed with skylight windows in your bathroom, which I don’t think anyone is, then do your make up by any window at your house. The truth is, if you are doing your make up in the dark or in yellow/orange light, you are just making it super difficult for yourself to achieve amazing flawless results. Firstly, it’s harder to blend properly and secondly to color-match your foundation. Have you ever stepped outside and realized you have 2 patches of bright pink blush on your cheeks? Or unblended foundation marks near the ears and neck? That’s probably because you do your make up in bad uneven lighting…and in a hurry, which leads me to my second point.
Take your time.
I’m aware that time is luxury for most, but that doesn’t mean you should slap on a full face of glam-make up in 3 and a half minutes and believe that it looks perfect. If you don’t take your time and pay attention to what you are doing then what’s the point of even having make up on your face at all? Make up if used incorrectly can have the opposite effect of beautifying and enhancing your features, and who wants that? Why even bother then? So take your time and do it well.
Invest in your tools.
Good brushes are the secret behind every talented make up artist. Good quality artisan brushes like Hakuhodo, Rae Morris, Weyn Goss, Suqqu, Chikuhodo are currently the best in the market and my favorites. If those options are out of budget then Ecotools, Real Techniques, Lily Lolo and Bdellium Tools are also great.
Brushes are very underrated in my opinion. For example if you use big scratchy dense blush brushes to apply blush then it goes on patchy and rubs off some of the coverage from the foundation underneath. Or stiff eye blending brushes; they just don’t blend; they need to be long and flexible with less hair. This video by Karima explains everything you need to know about good brushes and how to use them.
Prep your skin well
I’ve written several articles regarding skincare and how to achieve balanced smooth, calm skin, so I would urge you to go back and read them. Remember, your make up will only look as good as your skin underneath. Flaky,dry dehydrated, congested skin will still be all of the above even with make up on top, so prioritize your skincare if you are not happy with how make up looks on your skin.
Make this job easy and enjoyable,not hard. Bad lighting, lack of time, scratchy brushes and dehydrated skin are all obstacles that stand between you and greatly executed make up!
Melanie x
