Highlighting and Contouring with Etude House Sweet Recipe White Chocolate Highlighter and Face Color Corset

Hey guys! A lot of people have been requesting reviews on these two products that I'm about to feature right now, and some of you guys have messaged me on how I choose to highlight and contour ever since my Nyota Uhura Inspired FOTD. That being the case, I thought, why not combine those requests into one cohesive post, so here I am haha.

People then ask me how I contour and highlight, or if I contour and highlight at all. How, and to what degree you highlight your face is all about what you want to achieve. Some trends emphasize sharp planes, and that's definitely in on the runways right now. Some trends in Asia, however, give emphasis to supple looking curves, and plump healthy cheeks instead of the usual sullen high cheek bone. Hence fat grafts, and silicone injections suddenly becoming popular to give you that semi-baby-fat face. But honestly, you don't need all of that if you know how to contour and highlight to suit your face.

Disclaimer: I'm no professional here. Everything below is that I've personally learned from experience and heck, I may be damn wrong. So please feel free to correct me or give your opinions/recommendations! Let's all learn from each other, eh? :3

What I'll try to do here is show you how to evaluate your own face and determine yourself what type of look you want to achieve. Because let's face it. The harsh cheek bones and nose bridge tricks don't always work for everybody.

The Difference
So why contour in the first place? Does it really make that much of a difference?

The picture below shows you how I usually contour and highlight my face for everyday. I'm naturally quite thin and I've lost most of my baby fat. At the same time, there are parts of my forehead and temples that sink in more so than others, particularly in between my brows. As a personal preference, I prefer my face looking more filled and a bit plumper - in other words, my cheeks less sullen, while still maintaining that V shape that's so popular nowadays.

You can pretty much see how much fuller my cheeks look and the contouring by my jaw still gives the illusion of a pretty defined jawline. I've also taken the liberty of filling in that sunken part between my eyebrows and also contouring my nose to make the bridge appear higher and my eyes more deep-set.

The Products
I used two products to achieve that contour - Etude House's Sweet Recipe White Chocolate Highlighter and their Face Color Corset #5 in Tight Shading Corset. These products are my personal favorites, but of course, you may have your own.

I like the Chocolate Highlighter because the 3 shade blocks give you the option of varying degrees of emphasis. The packaging could be more sturdy, but as a product, it's a very subtle and natural highlight with fine shimmer (it's actually more pearlized than shimmer) that are noticeable, but appropriate for everyday wear. There's also very little fallout so that's a plus for me.

So the top shade in the picture above is a neutral highlight for when you want your skin to reflect a bit of light. The middle is an off-white that's good if you really want to emphasize planes of your phase and make them 'jut out' more, for lack of a better term. And the pinkish shade at the bottom works well for anywhere you want a rosy finish or highlight. Mixing them all together gives you a multi-dimension highlight which scatters light quite well.

Left to right in this picture corresponds to Bottom to Top in the Previous

This is a pretty good highlight palette to have if you're starting out and want shades to play and experiment with.

As for contouring, it's very important to pick a contour powder/brozner that matches your skin's undertone. Like foundations, there are warm and cool toned neutrals, and bronzers have to match your undertone as well as your skintone. Take into consideration how light your skin is (darker bronzers may just make your face look muddy) as well as whether or not it has a yellow, pink or neutral undertone and pick your bronzer accordingly.

Etude's Face Color Corset #5 in Tight Shading Corset suits my yellow undertone and is a very warm matte brown. Pardon the pictures below, they're both quite old and were taken quite a long time ago.

Flat/matte bronzers are better when you're starting out because shimmery bronzers might clash with your highlight if you aren't very careful. Unlike highlighters, it's hard to moderate the dimension you get with contouring with bronzers. You have to regulate your brush strokes with a light hand and different intensity to get the depth you want. As a cheat, however, and if you're not very used to contouring, you can always mix your bronzer in with varying amounts of your normal face powder (or a powder that's a tone lighter than your skin) to get varying depths of contour. Be careful though! You don't want to cake on too much powder on your face.

What Now?
It's important to know what you need and not what you want exactly. Take this example into consideration. People will often say that they want the face shape and makeup fo Kim Kardashian or Victoria Beckham. The thing is, not everybody has that bone structure, sometimes, that type of contouring just won't suit you. Wrong contouring can make you look years older than you are. So while you may want makeup like Kim or Vic, it may not be the best for your face shape.

The best thing to do is get to know your face shape and contour and choose makeup that complements it before you start trying out contouring to change your face shape entirely.

1. Get to know the planes of your face. Take a good look at your face. Feel it out. Which parts of your face seem bony, which seem filled, etc.

2. Identify which parts of your face are naturally contoured and highlighted. For me, my huge forehead is usually very shiney and really doesn't need much highlighting, so I'll refrain from highlighting there. Instead, I'll frame it off with a contour to make it less defined.
If you need help with this step, find a good front-facing picture of yourself taken with flash or good natural lighting (without makeup is usually better) and hike up the contrast like in the middle picture. You'll see the natural curves of your face a lot better and be able to identify sunken and plump parts of your face by where shadows are cast and light is reflected.

3. Determine whether you'd like to keep those contours and highlighst, emphasize them just a bit more, hide them or correct them. This is the hardest part. Most people will go straight to trying to correct their planes with an ideal (e.g. contour around their jaw harshly to get that V line). This might not always work for everybody. Try to come to terms with the natural planes of your face and just start off by subtly emphasizing what you already naturally have. Then once that's over, fill in the gaps - figuratively and literally. In my case, I have sunken areas between my brows and flat cheeks (circled in pink), so I'll concentrate more on highlighting there while only subtly highlighting the rest of my face that's already naturally highlighted.

Some more tips:
Highlighting gives you the option of more dimension and gives you a subtle gradient of levels and depths to choose from. In most cases it's a lot easier to do than contouring and is also more forgiving with mistakes. But in the long run, it does a lot more for the face than contouring.

Contouring on the other hand is a lot more drastic, and is for defining new planes all together (e.g. nose bridges, eye folds, cheekbones). The example below shows you just how drastic contouring can get (check my cheekbones guys. I look emaciated).

Be careful guys!

The bottom line is this: Spend less time looking at pictures of celebrity makeup and face shapes you want and spend more time getting to know your own face and embracing it. This will save you the temptation of getting plastic surgery to fix everything (although I honestly have nothing against it) and will also help you in case you do want to fix it, permanently or through simple makeup.

I'm aware I didn't give any concrete tips aside from what I usually do for my face, but that's the thing. It's different for everybody so the generic "define your cheekbones" or "highlight your cheeks" won't always work. If you already have naturally high cheekbones and plump cheeks, doing the above will just make you look like a caricature. It's all about balance. Yin and Yang my peeps. haha.

So yeah, I hope this helped somehow. This post was very difficult to write up and prepare haha. Please don't kill me if I'm wrong hahaha.

See you on my next post! Feel free to comment with suggestions and questions below :) I'd love to hear what you think!

Ada, signing out.

Follow me!
Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | Google + | Bloglovin