Uses for white eyeliner

White eyeliner can actually be useful for more than lining your eyes...in fact, I would never actually line my eyes with it. It's white, so it's a great highlighter.

These are the two main ways I would use white liner - for both, do this after you done all your other make up as the final step.

1. This is the main and most frequent use - highlight the inside corners of your eyes. It makes them look brighter and bigger. (You can also line the bottom rims of your eyes with white to make them look bigger, but this is tricky and the white doesn't blend so well on your waterline and can end up giving you a doll eye look. Great for a costume, not so great for every day.)

I draw a little v on the inside corners....

 

2. The second use is to make your lips look fuller. I line the outside of my lips in the cupids bow, and under the lower lip....

Then blend...you don't want to leave your face looking like a painters sketch with white lines everywhere.

For the eyes, just pat it gently until the edges are blended. For the lips do the same, being sure to blend away from your lips. If you blend the white onto your lips you'll end up losing any definition between your lip and your skin, which will make your lips look flat and smooshed, not defined and full. If you need to, redefine by reapplying lip liner.


Happy Highlighting.

What to do with Uncooperative Eyebrows

My eyebrows are a little bit crazy - they look thick, but really it's less individual hairs than you think...it's just that all the hairs there are really long and a bit curly. So it's just a few hairs covering a lot of space.

Which causes problems trying to trim and pluck them - so often I plucked just one hair and got a big bald strip through by eyebrow....and even when they're neatly plucked, the little curly suckers like to flick up all over the place.

So the way I (attempt) to tame them these days is:

1 Pluck. I still pluck below the bottom line of where I want my eyebrow to be, but now I always check where the hair is going before I pull it out to make sure it's not one of the vital ones covering a whole space on it's own.

2. Trim. I used to be afraid of trimming - putting scissors near my eyebrows is a scary thought considering how much damage I can do with a simple pair of tweezers. But using an eyebrow brush, or sometimes an eyelash brush, I brush the hairs up and down, and CAREFULLY, trim the long curly ones. Sometimes hair by hair so I don't go overboard. And I only trim a little bit. If I cut them too short I get sparse patches due to the aforementioned lack of individual hairs.

3. Fill. I have been using an angled brush and brown eyeshadow to define and fill in my eyebrows. I just recently bought an Eyebrow Enhancing Duo Kit by ChiChi, which has an eyebrow powder and a wax in it. I like the wax because it helps all the hairs sit down flat and stay lined up together. I know you can use clear mascara but that doesn't always hold my hairs down so it just ends up looking 'crunchy' when the hairs spring up all covered in crusty stuff. Yuk.

Anyway, filling and defining my eyebrows has proved to be the best trick for neatening them - or at least giving them the appearance of neatness when nothing else works. It disguises the individual hairs so you can't see all the craziness going on there so easily.

Plus it's great for disguising bald spots!

Eyebrow Enhancing Duo Kit