How to Contour and Highlight for Beginners

An easy and simple tutorial for contouring and highlighting. Perfect for beginners!

What do I use to contour?
Always look for matte, contouring products because we want it to look natural. Nothing shiny because again, we're going for the natural look! Remember as a golden rule in makeup, less is more! So always start off with less and work your way with more product if you need it.

Where do I contour?
Grab whatever brush you want to use. Line it up with the top of your ear and the corner of your mouth. You should be able to feel your cheek bones. If you don't know where it is, then try rolling your brush until you can feel the hollow under your cheek bone.

Here's perfect moment to distinguish between illuminators and highlighters.

Illuminators are used to give you a nice glow.

Highlighters bring attention to whatever part of your face you put it on. We use highlighters on our cheek bones to make them protrude and really stand out. It also adds a nice glow to your face :)

Liquids are good in terms of their staying ability. Powders tend to fade into the fine lines of your skin whereas liquids are a lot more reliable.

Let's begin!
Start close to your ear and work your way down. Work the brush in tiny circles to get a better blend. It should look something like this:

Next work it up into the side burn area of your face. Again, we want the most natural look. We can't have the makeup starting out of nowhere!

Now that the cheeks are done, we can move on to contouring the whole face. A lot of people stop at just their cheeks but if you want to contour your whole face, remember as a general rule the "Big 3". Just imagine there's a big 3 on the side of your face!

When you're blending near the temple of your head (the upper left and right corner of your forehead), make sure to move your brush more lightly. We don't want as hard of a contour for the temples as we do for the cheeks. Move LIGHTLY all the way from the corners to the middle of your forehead. Again, remember less is more.

Last of the big 3 is your jaw and if you want to accentuate the shape of your jaw or make it appear more slim, you can contour the jaw y blending slightly against your jawbone.

Additionally, you can contour your nose by applying very lightly some bronzer to the areas where you would like your nose to appear more slim.

Now to highlight, you can take a very light shade and apply it directly on top of your contoured cheeks, stopping directly at the middle of your pupil. You can also highlight under the arch of your eyebrow.

And there you have it! A easy contouring and highlighting tutorial for beginners. Special thanks to our image source friend, laurenbeautyy. All you really have to do is keep practicing and you will get it! Practice makes perfect! :)

Stay Pretty! ♥