Tutorial: Full Face Highlighting

Here's to hoping this fills the last gap of my face tutorials (for a complete list of tutorials I've written, see here). I've mentioned time and time again that contouring/highlighting is my favorite thing about makeup, so it's about time I showed you how I do it.

Highlighting is the natural complement to contouring. If contouring is about making shadows, highlighting is about creating light. Using both hand in hand makes for sharper features.

Here, a ridiculous photo of me with all the highlighted spots:

In list form:

1. Along the browbone/above the arch
2. Along the center of the nose
3. Under eyes/above the cheekbones
4. Smile lines
5. Cupid's bow

Before

After

Highlighting provides soft focus on certain areas of my face and diffusion on needed areas. My brows look more defined, nose taller, lips fuller, cheekbones sharper, and smile lines a little less obvious. The effect is subtle, some might even say unneeded, but I personally would rather do with than without.

You can use any highlighter you have on hand. My current favorite featured in this post is Dior's Airflash Primer, which isn't technically a highlighter (more like an illuminating primer), but works for me. Some others I like are Guerlain Meteorites, NARS Luxor, and LMdB Whisper. As you can probably tell, I prefer highlighters that are more opal/white/pink-toned as opposed to yellow ones, just because it works better for my skintone.

While highlighting is not something you'll ever need, if you're in a pinch and want a similar effect, I've gotten results using my concealer. It doesn't have the light reflecting qualities that highlighters do, but since my concealer is sometimes just slightly lighter than my skintone, it does the trick.