Explaining Highlight and Contour

My post yesterday mentioned using highlight to achieve a fresh faced look. I had someone ask to explain what highlight is... here it goes:

The human face is 3D (shocking I know), so naturally when light hits our face there are areas that appear brighter and areas that become shadowed. This is natural highlight and contour. To emphasize what happens when light hits our face we can use make up to bring out our bone structure.

Highlight: typically a highlight colour should be 2 shades lighter than your natural skin tone. This of course is a general rule of thumb for the most natural look and you can use any shade lighter, as long as it is well blended. I personally use I white loose powder shimmer as my highlight, but I go slightly highlight crazy on my cheekbones.

Highlight is applied to areas of the face where the bone structure sticks out most. Areas such as the front of the nose, on your forehead between your eyebrows, on the edge of the jaw bone just before it curves onto your neck, and my personal favourite place to highlight... the top of the cheekbones.

Contour: a typical contour should also be about 2 shades from your skin tone, only darker instead of lighter. Contour is kind of the opposite of a highlight. It is applied to areas on the face where light naturally causes a shadow. I would not suggest to go a lot darker with a contour colour because it may look very obvious, or possibly like you have dirt smeared on your face.

The areas on the face that are most often contoured are the sides of the nose (to make the nose look thinner), in the temples, just underneath jawline where it curves at the neck, and under the cheekbones (the area that you suck in when making a face like a fish)

*One thing to know about highlight and contouring is making sure it is very well blended. when you put the make up on you brush remove the extra powder on a tissue and lightly dust the areas of the face to be contoured.

Now that I have explained the basics of what highlighting and contouring is supposed to achieve, here are some ideas of what products to use.

• Foundation that is 2 shades lighter.darker than your skin tone (after you apply your foundation apply the highlight and contour using the same type of foundation before you powder, this will be the most natural look).
• Pressed powders (if you have a palette of powders and want to get good use of them use the lighter and darker shades as your highlight and contour, this will be slightly more obvious but still very natural looking)
• Blushes, eye shadows, bronzer, shimmer powder, any thing else that will work (these products will create the most dramatic effect, just remember to blend blend blend!)

I hope that explains things so you now have a basic understanding of how highlight and contour works and are able to try and play around with it.

I would love to hear your comments, questions, results about this post. Have specific questions? Feel free to send me an email at karleigh@karleighjohnstone.com, or find me on facebook (Karleigh Johnstone, I am the only one) and I will answer to the best of my ability.