How To Contour For Your Face Shape

Contouring is deepening of the skin to create a shadow and bring out what is next to it, so it is generally applied alongside your highlighter. Highlighter is applied to the areas you want to bring attention to and contour is applied to the areas you want to lessen the focus on. Blending, highlighting and contouring will give you a natural look.

How To Contour For Your Face

When choosing a contour shade, use either a bronzer, foundation or concealer that is a shade darker than your skin tone. To complete your most natural look, remember that warm skin tones look best in products with yellow undertones and cool skin tones look best with pink undertone products.

When highlighting and contouring, the goal is to work toward a more oval-looking face; which is known to be the ‘ideal face shape’. Using the below techniques, you will learn how to change the appearance of the face, be it either shortening or slimming your jawline, rounding off a square hairline, or emphasising your cheekbones. Before getting started into the contouring application, you will need to know your face shape so you know what attributes to emphasise and which areas to shade.

Find Your Face Shape

Stand in front of a mirror with your hair pulled back and carefully outline your face on the mirror with soap or a lip pencil. Now, look at the outline and compare it to the nine face-shape images below: 

Practice Makes Perfect – no one is a pro at their makeup at the get go, keep practising and you will adjust and perfect your technique and look as you go.