Makeup School: Day 3 - Contouring & Highlighting (Powder)

Oval faces are widely accepted to be the most 'ideal', balanced face shape. In contouring and highlighting, the aim is to correct facial features to better resemble the oval face. Other common face shapes include round, square, rectangular, long, diamond, heart, and triangular. To make things a bit more complicated, there's also 'half-half' shapes, where someone may have a widow's peak hairline (heart), but a strong jaw (square/rectangle). Regardless of the shape, try visualising an oval on the face. Any areas outside the oval are to be shadowed to shorten or reduce prominence, while highlighting has the opposite effect in bringing out features or lengthening.

Besides around the face, additional places to highlight or shadow include:

• Above inner eye
• Brownbone, eye socket
• Sides of nose, along bridge, under ball of nose
• Hollows of the cheeks, cheekbone, cheekplane, temples
• Cupid's bow (top lip), under bottom lips
• Top of chin

Tip: For best cheekbone contouring, shade only to align with ends of eyebrows. Don't take the line too far down towards the mouth!

Again, there are no rules of where to highlight and shadow as long as you use them correctly to bring out or receed features. As a guide, below are some example of face shapes and the best areas for contouring/highlighting.
Heart
The main aim is to reduce the pointiness of the chin and narrowing sides of forehead and cheeks.

Round
Best to highlight T-zone for length and contour to reduce width on sides of the face.

Square/Rectangular
Use shadows to soften angles around sides of forehead, on temples, and along jawlines. Highlight along T-zone to create length. Rectangular-shaped face contours similar to square-shaped but no contouring on temples to prevent narrowing the face further. A little shadow under the chin will shorten the face.

Diamond
Highlight on sides of forehead and jawline to bring out angles, while top of forehead, sides of cheeks, and under the chin can be shadowed to soften the 'points'.

Triangular
Brighten forehead to create width, but soften a strong jaw with shadowing along jawline. Highlighting on chin and nose bridge will sharpen bottom of the face.

Oblong
This face shape is longer than a typical over and would require some contouring around top of forehead and under chin to balance out. If the face is slightly narrow, the cheeks can be highlighted.

Oval
Of course, the oval face will not need any contouring, but should be highlighted to brighten and bring out the features.

My visual folder page on face shapes

Beginning of class was spent with theory and a demonstration, with the rest of the time spent taking turns to apply contouring on each other. Working with different shades of pressed powder, most of us seemed to quickly get the hang of it. Colour matching was a bit more difficult. In the end, our Trainer just got us to use any colour as long as it showed up enough for her to see we've applied it to the right spots. I was deemed to have an elongated heart (almost diamond) face shape, so my partner got to work with diminishing my pointy chin and sculpting my face to resemble an oval. By the end of class, I managed catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror with something resembling a 5'oclock shadow on my chin and hastily wiped it off before heading home.

Our trainer Danielle, used to be the senior makeup artist at Channel 10 (?) up til around 2007 and have worked mainly in television. It was really good to pick up so many little secrets from her and I learnt so much in this lesson!


xxEva