✔ |Tutorial| Shading and Highlighting

#2 Pink Veil Highlighter, 4 Light Shading Corset, Aloha V-Line Slim maker #1, Face Designing Brightener Sleek and Dolly Face by Etude House

Surprise Concealer Kit Flaw Coverage by Etude House 

Hey ladies, today I'm going to talk about shading and highlighting. First of all there are various products you could use to highlight and shade your face. Products specifically for that or Concealers! Many makeup artists use different shades of concealer for contouring!

Now, the brushes you can use are various as well. Here are a few of them:

Oblique brush for shading, Dual Fibre cheek brush for Highlighting, Face brush all from Etude House

Contour brush from Real Techniques

There is no limit in what brush you can use! You can use any brush that works for you depends on the finish you want to give. Transparent finish to go to work or a very bright finish with high contrast for a night out!

 The way of applying shading and highlight it has to do with the shape of your face, nose and cheek bones. There are different types of faces like Oval, Rectangle, Round, Square, Heart and Triangle. Oval and thin face is considered beauty in a lot of countries including Korea. 

The purpose of shading (for some people) is to create depth and make the face look as thin as possible. The purpose of highlighting is to point and stick out the parts of your face that you are proud of! Also, to create harmony on your face after you used bronzer!

I'm here to show you the way to apply shading and highlighting on different shape of faces so I used well known celebrities Asian and non-Asian because we are all humans after all!

First, I'm going to show you how other make-up artists have applied Contour and Highlight!

Here we have Park Shin Hye and the Look is by Etude House artists for Etude House product promotion. I raised the contrast of the picture so the shading is more visible to us now. The arrows are pointing at the shading on the left and right side of her face.

Park Shin Hye's face is round I believe. So the purpose of shading for her is to make her face look thinner. As you can see the her look was a success and it did make her face look thinner.

Now, lets take a look at Sandara's Park highlight and shading!

Light blue/grey is the highlight and Purple is the shading

First photo is the original, second is with high contrast and third is showing you the highlights and shades of her face. Dara's shape of face is long and thin (not very thin but she looks beautiful) so the shading doesn't have to be very wide. The purple line is the shading and the light grey/blue is the highlighting. 

The upper side of her cheekbones are also highlighted, an essential step for people with long face because it creates balance and makes the face looks cuter. Long face is still not oval so the goal is to make it look like Oval shaped. Many people have flat noses and a way to make a nose look like the bridge is sticking out is to apply bronzer on the side of the nose and highlight the bridge of the nose like on the photo above.

Please keep in mind that his way of highlighting and contouring is for Square shaped faces with small nose

A detail diagram of highlight and shading I made on Keira's Photo. This is how you Contour and Highlight a person with SQUARE face and small nose. The arrows shows you how to move the brush on the face. Circular movements and finish the swipe where the arrow points.

A more complicated way for shading and I've noticed that usually Asian makeup artists use this technique. This time you apply  bronzer all around the face and on the under side of your jaw and top half on neck.

Let's go back to Park Shin Hye's Round Face!

We can see more of her face on this picture. The shading starts from the top of her forehead and goes down to her chin. I rounded the bronzer so you all girls can see. A simple shading to make her face look thinner.

My face is long so I use Sandara's Park way for contouring but my nose isn't small and flat so all I do is to highlight it. Here is a video of me applying the bronzer with the face brush because I wanted to create a natural look, Click here for the video. Please keep in mind that video is months old and I've changed my technique to more circular motions and I usually use the Opaque brush for shading. I will make a video of how I do it, in the future. I basically wanted to show you how to do it on Round and Square faces in this post.

The difference between long face and square face shading is the width of the bronzer line. It has to be wider on wide faces.

The shading under the cheekbones is something to be used only if your cheekbones are not very visible, if you have cheekbones like Park Shin Hye (for example) it would only make them stick out more and maybe it won't look as good. This technique is something I don't usually use often and it's mostly used on western type of faces! Also it makes your cheekbones look like falling downwards and believe me that's not very youth looking or nice in general.

Disclaimer: This way is my way of applying contour and highlight on mine and other people's faces and it doesn't mean that it's the BEST way but there are certain rules you need to follow to see the finish you are looking for. Be aware that I'm no expert at this and I made this post by experience and noticing other's make-up artists techniques.

I hope this Tutorial helped you and please feel free to ask if you have any questions on the comments below!

Thank you for reading!
-Eva