Top 5 common makeup mistakes that are so easy to fix…

A lot of people are ready to compliment me on my make-up application skills but also with adding the side comment that it’s easy when I have perfect skin anyways.  This is not true.  My skin is super dry, I have to moisturize like crazy, and I do get breakouts occasionally.  But when I apply make up, I do it in a way that hides or detracts from my flaws, and then accentuates the parts of my face that I do like.  But a lot of mistakes that I notice in people’s overall make up look can be summed up in skin care and application.  You need to perfect the two of these factors to find the right products for your face…and show off what you love about your face.

Common Visible Mistakes:

1)  Putting on too much foundation mixed with oily combination skin, mixed with cakey powder to set.  I’ve seen this on really pretty young women and almost want to sit them down, wipe off what they are using and reapply it myself.  It totally distracts from their great facial shape features, because the skin texture is so wrong. The look is very bumpy, and cakey, it leaves a lot of pores visible, and blemishes are also still visible because of bumps.  Uneven foundation is visible everywhere, because foundation builds up in dry areas and cracks, and literally slides off of oily areas.

The ways to fix cakey foundation is to first examine your skin type.  If you have oily skin, maybe you can skip foundation and powder and go straight to a 2 in 1 cream formula, reducing the layers of make-up needed. Another thing to do is to not use thick foundation as a concealer.  If you have blemishes, try to heal them, and cover that area with a thin layer of concealer.  Dry flakey skin needs exfoliation. Doubling the foundation is just a bad idea.  The bottom line is less is more.  You want your real skin to shine through, but piling on the foundation looks just like that.  A huge mess on an otherwise pretty face!  I know you’re thinking I’m stating the obvious, but a lot of girls don’t really LOOK at their finished made up faces.  Examine your skin type, and take care of its needs accordingly.

2)  Over done/Undone Brows

I had a really cute co-worker once who was into photos.  The only problem was one of her friends took and over exposed photo of her (too bright), and in effect, erased the fact that she had very light, undefined brows.  So in the photo she looked browless!  That sent her to the nearest Sephora to get a brow pencil.  But what she also should have done, was a bit of grooming as well plucking stray hairs, to have a base shape of brow for the pencil to go on top of. But on the other spectrum, over defined brows are not appealing either, even though there was a make-up trend recently on thick defined brows were more youthful (think retro Brook Shields), but in my opinion, nothing beats a balanced brow treatment.  The lesson is not to ignore your brows…they frame your eyes which are in essence the most beautiful soulful part of your face…

3)  Harshly lined eyes:

Eye liner is something I love to hate.  The eyeliner pencil around the eye can turn very dated 80’s for some reason…I think it is the harshness of it.  Not to be confused with liquid liner that creates bold lines and shapes, but the ubiquitous black pencil eyeliner that signals the uninspired lining of the eye can look unnatural, and I feel can age a person.  My trick is to smudge it, and use with darker shadows, to hide the linear quality of pencil lines.  Another trick is to just use black eye shadow and a fine brush to line eyes.

4)  Not enough make-up:

I’m never an advocate for looking like a circus clown, but the reverse problem is not wearing enough make-up, which defeats the purpose of wearing make-up.  A beautiful cobalt blue eye shadow, lining and accenting the upper eyelid is stunning, but without face foundation and a loose powder to set, the eye colour doesn’t pop, and can easily slide off the face long before the end of the day.  The lesson is that beautiful make-up work in any area, needs a base of ample make-up application, or else, it’s quite pointless to even try.

5)  No blush

We are living in hectic time crunched times.  Also I know our make-up budget is often limited.  So what is the first makeup item that gets skipped?  Blush.  I used to always skip blush when I was a in my twenties.  The reason being that I thought it looked too done up.  I liked a pale, mal-nurished look (hey, I was a weird art student!), but not anymore.  Now a days, I feel blush really puts a finishing touch to a nice make-up application.  And it is super pretty to have colour on the cheeks.  So don’t skip this…