Tough Femme Look

With my last post on cervical cancer awareness, I got inspiration from the pink and purple theme of the event for another makeup tutorial. However, I did this with a twist - instead of plastic-y pink, I went for an edgy, tough girl look where I muted the feminine colors with gray, black, and brown and came up with this smoky eye look with a tad of balance using a neutral plum-colored lip without overpowering the smoky eye. I emphasized facial structure to strengthen the features but balanced it with the femininity of the color scheme. The look here is feminine due to the color scheme but edgy and astig.

All ready now? Get your brushes ready and let's start.

I went for a clean and moisturized face as always and applied foundation, concealer and powder. In my case, I applied foundation only where needed and dusted this with powder since this is just an everyday easy look. For photoshoots or evening event looks, I might need the power of full-coverage foundation.

Then, I brought out the planes of my face by contouring. Contouring is oftentimes skipped for everyday natural looks, but here, I included contouring to emphasize the facial structure. Now, depending on the facial structure, this could vary. Since I have a square-shaped face, I brough out my cheekbones, shaded the sides of my forehead, temple, and jawline. I contoured my nose too, for dimension and highlighted above my eyebrows and cheekbones and chin. I made sure to blend the contours to avoid any demarcation lines. Make sure to use matte powders when contouring/shading since shimmery bronzers reflect light and defeat the purpose of shading.

Frame the face by defining the eyebrows. I went for definition with an ashy brown pencil like MAC in Lingering.

I lined my eyes with dark brown pencil and got in between the lashes so my lashes look fuller and my eyes more defined.

Normally, I'd just throw in some mascara and lipstick and I'm done but let's take it a step further and add color. Since I like colors to adhere, I prepped my lids with a cream base. For oily lids, I could suggest prep+prime, paint pots, or UDPP to totally seal in the color. Cream bases are good if you have dry lids, like me. I can also use cream eyeshadow in a nude shade or concealer.

Now that my lids are prepped up, it's time for color. I took a bright fuschia shade and dabbed this to my lids and blended well. (most of the shadows here are from my CS 78-color palette)

Wait, so the look is supposedly tough right? But why is a girly bright pink doing here? Okay, we're still gonna mute that. I then got a neutral lilac color in a satin or semi-matte finish and applied this to my inner crease blending towards the browbone.

For a bit of smoky effect, take a plum-brown color like the one shown and apply this to the outer corner of the eye. Arc this to the crease for definition and blend towards the browbone. In this tutorial, I winged this outwards into a cat's eye shape.

Okay, now it's time for more smoky-smoky stuff. Take some black eyeshadow (I used a combination of the black from my CS palette and MAC eyeshadow in Mont Black from the Chill collection) and use a small eyeshadow brush to line your lashlines (meaning both upper and lower lashlines). You could line your lashline first with black eyeliner (want to be intense? get those kohls out) and use the eyeshadow to set the liner for more intensity or just go ahead with the eyeshadow if you wish. I blended the top part a bit to avoid ugly demarcation lines. Highlight the browbone with a neutral matte or satin eyeshadow (or the skintone color in your contouring palette).

I also put silver highlight on the inner corners of my eyes (MAC eyeshadow in Arctic Gray from the Chill collection) for a bit more sparkle.

Finally, I curled my lashes and applied lots of mascara. You could add falsies if you wish. For demo purposes, I didn't use falsies.

For blush, I used a mauve shade and swept a wash of blush on my cheeks. In my case, I applied it under my cheekbones and topped it with highlighter like MAC MSF in Redhead (I used the gold side for warmth) on the apples of my cheeks.

For lip color, I lined my lips with lipliner for more structural definition and filled it in. Lip color was a creamy but natural shade like NARS in Damage. I blotted this and then topped it with a shiny and sheer lipcolor with glitter particles instead of gloss such as Clinique in Water Violet.

The outcome:

Eye detail. As you can see... my eye-poking incident is completely healed and there were no detrimental effects to my vision. YAY!