Five Contouring Mistakes to Avoid

Contouring can enhance your features and give you a flawless finish, but it's important to avoid common mistakes.

Contouring has become a makeup essential as it slims down the nose, lifts the cheekbones and sculpts the face quite subtly.

It was at first a technique used by professional makeup artists, but even amateurs and all makeup lovers use it in their daily makeup routine.

Contouring flatters the natural features of the face and can drastically change your entire makeup look, and was first a red carpet essential for all celebrities.

As the makeup world has popularized so much, and more and more tutorials are available on the internet to flawlessly contour, the art has become quite easy.

However, there are some mistakes that one tends to make while contouring, and instead of looking fab ends up looking drag.

Here are five common mistakes we tend to make while contouring, and if we avoid them, our contouring makes our makeup like those of goddesses:

A Wrong Bronzer Shade

Bronzer is the product used for contouring and hell breaks loose if we end up using a wrong shade for our skin tone. The trick to select a bronzer is to pick one that is just one or two shades darker than your skin tone, and not opt for one that looks great on our best friend. A very dark bronzer makes your skin look muddy and instantly ages you, and matte bronzers always look more natural than shimmery ones.

Not Blending Bronzer

When you have picked out that perfect shade of bronzer, the next step is to apply it correctly and blend blend blend it! A bronzer is NOT a blush, and should be applied holding your brush vertically so only the tips of the brush bristles touch the area. The next step is to blend it like your life depends on it, else you will end up with bronzer streaks on your face.

Applying Too Much Highlighter

Yes, the trend these days it to be highlighter goddess and one tends to go all overboard with the product in our attempts to look like Rihanna, but again the mistakes come when we don't blend it enough. Remember that just the way you blended your bronzer, you have to blend your highlighter too else it will end up looking like a sparkling streak on your face. After blending both products separately, one great trick is to take a clean fluffy brush and go over your bronzer and highlighter together so that they don't look like unnatural on your face.

Wrong Under-Eye Concealing

Another concealing mistake that we make is too go over-board with concealing the under-eye area, and using a concealer that is way too bright in our attempts to highlight it. If you have serious dark circle, use an orange-tone concealer first and then pack on a concealer only a shade or two lighter than your natural skin tone in order to uplift and highlight it. Going overboard with it and using the wrong shades of concealing and baking powder can end up making your under-eye too bright and will make your contour dark and muddy.

Going Overboard With Blush

Once you have contoured your face, you just have to add a touch of color on your cheeks to make them pop. There are different ways to apply blush, and to uplift the cheeks you can swipe your brush upwards to your temples, but with already contoured cheekbones, softly tap the color on to the apples of your cheeks. Try not to smile too much else once you stop smiling, the color droops down and ages you. Keep your smile natural, and that will make your blush application better.