Very, Very Basic Eye Shadow Tips

I typed this up for one of my roommates today, and since I'd already gone through all that trouble, I thought I'd share it with y'all.  It's just some really, really basic tips about applying shadow and liner.  Like eye shadow 101 status.


Ok, so:

When you’re doing eye makeup you have two goals:

            -To define your crease, which makes your eyes look deeper set aka sexier

-To define your upper and lower lash lines, which makes your eyes stand out more from the socket

Defining the crease:

-In order to make your eyes look deeper set, you want to make your crease appear to recede and your lid appear to come forward.

-You can do this using a combination of matte and shimmery colors.  Matte colors mimic the natural shadows of your eye, and shimmery colors attract light and make areas appear to come forward.

-Therefore, you use a matte color blended in your crease to make your eyes look deeper set, and you use a shimmery color across the lid to make your lid look like it’s coming forward.

-Always do a lighter color towards the inner corner of your eye (doing a dark color there will make you look tired), and a dark color towards the outer corner of your eye.  This makes your eye look more rounded.

Defining the lash line:

-You want to push liner or shadow onto your lash lines to create contrast with the white of your eye, which makes your actual eyes stand out more.  You can do this two ways:

            1.  The clean way:

-Line your upper lash line with a gel or a liquid liner

-Line your lower waterline with pencil liner

                        2.  The smudgy way:

-Line your upper lash line with pencil liner, and smudge the liner right into the base of your lashes

-Line your lower lash line with pencil liner (smudge the pencil liner into the base of your lower lashes)

Colors:

Flattering your skin tone: if you have warm skin (skin with pink or red undertones), then you want to use warm colors.  These include browns, taupes, golds, pinks, reds, purples, etc.  Stay away from cool colors like greens, blues, cool-toned pinks and purples, because these will fight with your skin’s undertones and make you look sickly.  The opposite goes for cool skin--use cool colors.  Of course, that's not a 100% of the time rule, but when you're just starting out with eye shadow it's much easier to stick to colors that flatter your skin tone.

           

Flattering your eye color: you want to use color wheel theory to come up with color combinations that will flatter your eye color.  For example, blue and orange are complementary colors. When you put orange next to blue it makes the blue look more vibrant, so blue eyes would look pretty against orange eye shadow.  If you have brown eyes, you have a lot of options because brown is a neutral, but you look especially good in browns, taupes, pinks, and purples.  Gold can be pretty, but you don’t want a yellowy-gold, as this can bring out the yellow in your brown eyes and make you look jaundiced.

I hope this helps somebody!  I'm no makeup expert, but I took about a million years of art classes, so I have a basic understanding of shapes and colors.  Fun times.