My Vivacious Metamorphosis

Okay, quick one here. I’ve mentioned before that I have protruding eyes (i.e., they stick out of my face), which means I end up with a puffy pocket cupping the bottom of my eye. Most of you will get this puffiness when you smile… like your skin is cupping itself around the bottom of your eyeball. Nice!

For me, because my eye juts out, it’s far more pronounced whether I am smiling or not. This, let me tell you, is friggin’ ridiculous. Let me show you a photo of what I mean:

As you can see, yeah. It’s not a good look. I wouldn’t mind it so much if it only happened when I smiled, but ugh.

Anyway, with my skills and confidence with eye makeup slowly building, I realized that this puffy problem was pissing me off. It sucks when you spent a pile of time on your eye makeup only to fixate on these two giant saggy bags that are clinging onto your eyeballs for dear life.

So, solutions began. Lisa Eldridge, a lovely makeup artist whose website can be found via Google, suggests caffeine-based eye treatments to treat the problem. Which is great and does work, but it doesn’t solve my problem on the spot. Hence began my research into under-eye concealer.

It was, as it turned out, Lisa Eldridge to the rescue yet again, though Marlena from Makeup Geek was helpful as always. Together (and along with other gurus and just people in the know), they share some key points around choosing and applying the right under-eye concealer.

First, you want something that not very creamy. The thicker it is, the more likely it is to cake up and end up making your eyes look like they have tiny stretch marks under them. Not good. Something with a gel consistency (like Eve Pearl’s Salmon Concealers) or something that is thinner (like MAC’s Studio Finish or Clinique’s Airbrush Concealer) is going to be better than a creamy concealer. For the most part… this varies from product to product.

Second, there is a different between dark circles under your eyes and the puffiness I am talking about here. Different products will work better for each of these problems. I don’t have dark circles (I don’t think), so I looked mainly for stuff around puffy eyes.

Third, for puffy eyes you want something reflective or brightening. That is, the concealer has light-reflecting properties that serve to brighten the area it’s concealing.

Fourth, it is very, very important that you only apply concealer where it’s dark; applying it to the surrounding area as well (as you would face concealer) will not work because it will just make everything the same color which means the shadows will still be there. So, a steady and controlled hand that is good at blending is very necessary.

Fifth, it’s generally a good idea to apply this AFTER you’ve done your eye makeup, because then the concealer not only covers up the dark baggy shadow but it also cleans up any smudges or fallout that isn’t budging.

I currently use MAC’s Studio Finish concealer under my eye, and it works all right but it’s not quite brightening enough. It does reduce the puffy look, but not by as much as I’d like. Product research has pointed to Clinique’s Airbrush Concealer,  YSL’s Touch Eclat Concealer, and the Body Shop’s Lightening Touch as possibilities, but these are all super expensive so they’ll have to wait a while!

For the longest time, the only makeup brush I owned was a big powder one that came with some mineral foundation I bought one time. Now, I have about ten brushes dedicated to use on my face, most of which I reach for every time I decided to wear makeup. In this post I’ll tell you a bit about each brush, specifically why I bought it and what I use it for (if I still use it).

The full list (with links and explanations to follow) is:

• Nude by Nature Application Brush
• Manicare Precision Blending Sponge
• Ecotools Brush Set
• Makeup Geek Angled Contour Brush
• Makeup Geek Deluxe Foundation Stippling Brush
• Amuse Fan Brush
• Sigma F55 Small Duo Fibre Brush
• Sigma F10 Powder/Blush Brush
• Sigma Hollywood Glamour Retractable Kabuki Brush
• Bobbi Brown Face Blender Brush

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I’m Chinese. That, as you can imagine, informs a gigantic chunk of this post. While I do not have a monolid, my eyes are small and I do not have a prominent crease. On top of that, my eyes actually protrude forward, and I would post photos but I HATE looking at my face from the side so that might have to wait for a better day. Point is: eye makeup was a pain in the ASS for me to learn.

While all the “Youtube Beauty Gurus” as they are apparently known certainly know their stuff, not an awful lot of them know what to do with eyes like mine. They either generate looks that don’t suit me or that I just don’t like… and the looks I DO like, I can’t apply the same way because my eyes aren’t shaped the same way.

So, after some painstaking research, a LOT of makeup remover, and a few odd-looking nights out, here is what I have learned about eyes.

USE A PRIMER - This is apparently a golden rule for eye makeup in general, but I would say that it is goldener for those of you with eyes like mine… namely, hooded and small.

KNOW THE SHAPE OF YOUR EYE - My eyes are apparently hooded, which means that I have no discernible crease and when I open my eyes, any color on my lid is basically invisible because the skin above my eye actually comes down and covers it, like Blake Lively’s eyes in this photo. This is not uncommon. For me, this means that I have to bring crease colors higher so that they can be visible even when my eyes are open. It also means I shouldn’t wear too much eyeliner, otherwise it can overpower any visible color. (And, even worse, it means I get a weird bulge/protrusion just under my eye that, on me, looks particularly awful… you can also see it in Ms Lively’s photo as well, though her makeup has served to take attention away from it.)

REMEMBER THAT OTHER PEOPLE CAN STILL SEE YOU WHEN YOUR EYES ARE CLOSED - Yeah, this was a hilarious one for me… one of those DUH moments. So yes, just because *I* can’t see the colors on my lid doesn’t mean other people can’t, particularly when I’m blinking, looking down, or even when they are looking at me from other angles. Hence, it is perfectly okay for me to load color onto my lid if I want to.

DARK COLORS CAN BE USED TO “SINK” PARTS OF YOUR EYE - It’s basic science/art/common sense: stuff that’s darker looks further away than stuff that’s lighter. While I knew this early on, I did not know until later that this meant dark colors can be used in the crease to make those of us with protruding eyes look like we actually HAVE a crease!

USE EYESHADOW TO SET LIQUID OR GEL EYELINER - I didn’t learn this until very recently, and I’m glad I did, because it makes a lot of sense. For those of us with hooded eyes, the skin that comes forward OVER our crease generally comes right over part of our lashline as well, which means it sits right on any eyeliner we might be wearing and then pull it away, leaving a lovely black line somewhere on our eye. For those of us with SMALL eyes, it also means that when we close our eyes, our eyeliner can smudge onto the skin UNDER our lower lashline. Double whammy for me, yay. The solution is to just use eyeshadow that is a similar color to your chosen eyeliner and smudge a small amount of it on top of whatever eyeliner you’ve used. This also smokes out the eyeshadow and blends it nicely into your eye.

USE THE RIGHT TOOLS - I cannot emphasize this enough, so I will just say it again.

USE THE RIGHT TOOLS - What this means is… use the right brushes. I started out with a small pack of cheap eye brushes that, in the end, turned out to be rubbish for my eyes. They were of good quality, but none of them were the right shapes, sizes, or densities for me. So when I was trying to duplicate some looks I found online and my makeup didn’t look right, part of the reason turned out to be that I wasn’t using the right tools for the job, which meant my makeup was ending up in places I didn’t want it to be. When I finally DID get hold of the right brushes, this made everything so much easier. I might make a more detailed post about this another time, it’s THAT important.

PRACTICE - There are a million ways to do eye makeup right and about a billion ways to do it wrong, but in the end, different things work for different people, and it’s practice that makes perfect. You could even argue that it wasn’t the tools that solved my problem, but simply the practice (but man did the right tools ever make the job easier!). When I was bored I would just sit down in front of a mirror and (using the cheaper eyeshadows and no primer in the interest of saving money) I would just play with my makeup, seeing what looked good and what didn’t. I’d practice blending colors and matching colors and how to use what brush. And it began to pay off, which was great, but it took a while.

How long did it take? Well, I didn’t ever manage to get my eye makeup perfect until, well, New Year’s Eve… which was… three nights ago. So it does take a while, but oh my GOD was it ever perfect. I should reproduce that look and post it up so you can see it, I was THAT proud.