[MakedaMaysa]

Originally Posted by Azhia

You have gorgeous lips and a great smile!

For contouring (it's like playing with shadows) you need basically 2 colours (it could be matte eye shadow or face powder or cream-based product): 1) colour that is a shade darker than your natural skin tone, it could even be a blush colour and 2) a highlighter colour, with which you have a little more flexibility whether it be shimmery eye shadow or face powder or also a blush colour, as long as it's lighter than natural skin tone.

Nose: take the darker colour and run that down from the inner corners of your eyes to the tips of the nose, so you'll have parallel lines of shading. Take the highlighter colour and run that straight down the center of your nose to the tip. Sometimes you need not bother with the 2 parallel lines of dark colour; I will often take a shimmery gold and run a straight line of that down the nose, even onto the lips and tip of the chin and that does the trick.

Cheekbones: take the darker colour and blend into the hollows of your cheeks. Highlight the cheek bones with the lighter colour. Again, you can opt to just use a gold or some shimmery colour to highlight the cheekbones themselves, depending on how intense you want the application to look.

If you want to invest in only 1 product, I would invest in the highlighter colour. I find highlighting easier than contouring. Go with whatever tone your skin is (gold-ish if you have yellow undertone or coral/peach-ish if you have pink undertone). Then you can also take that highlighter colour and dust your shoulder caps, and along the collar bone to create more definition, if you need/want it. I like drama so I'm all about highlighting and creating striking lines.

I love reading Azhia's tips! It's so fun seeing the ideas of another make-up artist!

If you ladies are looking to do contouring/highlighting, MAC has put out some new powders - Shape and Sculpt. They're great to work with - matte shades that give you the contour and highlight you want without adding shimmer.

Mally Beauty has a great product trio called Shimmer, Shape and Glow. The palette includes a matte contouring shade, a highlighting shade with a slight glow and a beautiful blush to add a pop of color to the cheeks. It comes in shades suitable for lighter and darker skin.