When it comes to improving your look, one of the first things that you should focus on would be contouring. Yes, I found that contouring can actively help you enhance your style and it pushes it to the next level. There’s a reason why it has become commonplace in many different showcases worldwide, because it does bring an incredible advantage and it can highlight some of your positives, while hiding negatives.

What do we define as contouring?

Contouring involves shaping your face with makeup, as you try to enhance the facial structure. It’s very important because it allows you to make certain facial features stand out, without it being too restrictive. While the older ways of contouring were more about achieving a certain look, these days contouring is more about adding a realistic tone to your face. That does become a bit hard to do at times, but it’s well worth using.

Contouring and using bronzer have always been seen as an identical thing, but that’s not the case at all. Bronzing will give you a warmer complexion via blending the product, trying to mimic what the sun would naturally do. However, in the case of contouring, you work more on the angles without focusing too much on the skin color, unless it becomes absolutely necessary.

What do you need for contouring? It depends on a multitude of things, but in general you want a cream contour, powder contour or anything around that nature. Some women will choose to use bronzer, that’s up to you.

What steps do you need to follow when you want to contour your face?

Prepare your face

Before any contouring starts, you always want to make sure that your skin is prepared and ready to go. In order to prevent makeup from forming around the dry skin, you want to wash your face first. You also need to apply moisturizer, because that can help you quite a bit. Prime the face with some primer that acts as a barrier between your skincare products and the makeup.

During this process, it also makes a lot of sense to cover any dark spots or blemishes with concealer or foundation. Those should match your natural undertone or skin tone, just to make sure that there’s no nuances that stand out too much, so keep that in mind.

Shadow

Once you finish with that, you will need to think about shadowing. A very popular contouring method is to try and use a darker shade in order to create a shadow under your cheekbones. What you want to do is to suck in the cheeks and trace the product onto the hollow parts, trying to maintain the natural temple and jawline shape. Then you place the shadow either under the sides of your nose, under the cheekbone and jawline or in a 3 shape following your hairline.

Highlighting

After this, you want to add a bit of a concealer shade to the facial areas that reflect light. Most of the time, these will be the top of the cheekbones, the tip of your nose, but also the nose bridge, the forehead and around the eyes or your brow bone. Highlighting is not going to be a complex or tedious process, but it is important because it adds to your look, and that does help enhance the style and experience quite a bit.

Using blush

Blush needs to be applied to the apples of your cheeks, but keep in mind it’s not a mandatory step. However, the reason why I include it is because it allows you to bring a more natural look. Appearing more natural is crucial when you are contouring your face, and using blush is definitely going to offer that unique result. With that in mind, I do recommend it because it does offer a bridge between the highlight areas and your shadow. And yes, you can also experiment and try out things, which is exactly what makes it an excellent tool for everyone to use.

Blend everything properly

Blending is where a lot of things can go really well or wrong. The idea here is that you want to blend the shadows and highlights into the foundation layer or your skin. In my case, I think that using a blending brush, fluffy brush or even a makeup sponge will help quite a bit.

When do you need to stop from blending? That depends, in general I try to do that until I see the lines appear to be very natural. After all, the main focus of facial contouring is to try and keep things with a natural look. Sometimes it works, other times it won’t, but it always helps to experiment and try this out until it matches your vision. I think it’s totally worth giving it a try, and you should test it for yourself.

Setting it all in place

Once you are ok with the current look and if it feels very natural, then you can go to the next step. That means you are ready to set it all in place. You can use either spray or setting powder as the means to lock the sculpted face and take its look to the next level. Plus, doing this will bring a more cohesive, creative finish, while also offering you a way to avoid any possible issues or challenges that can arise.

What are the benefits of facial contouring?

• With facial contouring, you will find it easier to enhance your facial balance. That can be difficult to do normally, but this makes the process simpler and also a lot more convenient.
• Another benefit I noticed is that it allows you to tighten skin issues, while rectifying some of the problem. Granted, it’s not the solution to this, but if you want to improve your look for the day or for a special event, this will do wonders and it’s exactly why it can be a solid option to consider.
• It can also help boost the collagen production too. A lot of people think that contouring can lead to issues for your skin, that’s not the case. In fact, studies have shown that it will actually improve the collagen production, and that alone is going to matter quite a bit.
• Lastly, it also gives you a better way to reduce unwanted jowls. I know a lot of women have a problem with this, but you can stop dealing with that issue simply by contouring. It also helps you enjoy a more refined, comprehensive, yet still really good look, all without having to worry about any problems or challenges.

Conclusion

I enjoy contouring and I think that if it’s done right, it can help improve your look. Being able to highlight certain parts of your face and bring the focus towards them is always going to be a major advantage. Of course there are challenges that do arise from time to time. But for the most part, I think it’s a lot better and easier to focus on contouring, because once you do that, the results are great. Take your time, experiment with the contouring technique I showed above, and if you have any questions or ideas, don’t hesitate to leave a message here!