You browse through Instagram, pausing to admire the latest makeup look from one of your favourite posters. You look at the bold make-up colours, the striking dark lip, the smoky eye that is perfect down to the very last stripe. Or perhaps you find yourself at a beauty counter, swatching colours on the back of your hand and holding them to your face for comparison. You can’t resist the lure of trying the bright pink or the blue-toned red so reminiscent of old Hollywood movies.
Maybe it’s more simple than that. You hover your brush over the colours in your eyeshadow palette. You pause for a moment over the cyan blue, the mint green, the deep purple—and then you move on back to the browns and neutral tones you have used so often. The bolder colours sit, undisturbed, the same way they were when you opened the packet for the same time.
How to be Confident Wearing Bold Make-Up
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Wearing bold makeup can feel like a bold decision. It’s as if you’re putting yourself up for judgment, taking chances that you are not entirely sure you’re able to pull off. But why live in a world of neutrals by choice? By all means, no one can argue that neutrals and gentle brown and taupe shading is more appropriate for the office—but for nights out, shopping trips with friends. Maybe it’s time to be more adventurous?
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A Shady Deal: Pick shades that suit you
There’s no such thing as a person not suiting a colour. As a blonde, you might think that you can’t wear anything purple as it clashes. For a brunette, the yellows and pinks may give you cause for concern. If you’re a redhead, almost everything feels like a clash with the occasional exception for green. So if you’re having to fight your skin and hair tone, why make it worse with bold colours?
The problem is never the colour itself, but the shade. For some, a teal eyeshadow would look ridiculous; more akin to an older woman applying it up to her eyebrows in the belief it makes her eyes look bigger. You could probably be fooled into thinking that that means you should steer clear of blue, because it looks so bad—right?
Not so. That same person who winced away from the mirror could be lured back to it with a midnight blue shade around the eye socket, or a light baby blue over the lids themselves. It’s always about shade, never colours.
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Why not just give it a try?
With the “will it suit me?” crisis averted, it’s time to turn to the biggest issue of them all. Why not? If you like the look of bold, bright, and fabulous makeup, then there’s really no valid reason to give it a go outside of the office.
Think of the things that we do for beauty. We blast sand particles at our skin (though we prefer to call it “microdermabrasion” so we feel better about it), we use chemical peels and go through devout skincare regimes, we tweak our looks with plastic surgery, fillers and more. So in the midst of all these changes and adaptations to our looks, what’s a bit more colour going to do? It’s just another expression of beauty & creativity.
Try and start small, with a brighter eyeliner as a first choice rather than a radical switch of lipstick choices. When you’re emboldened, you will soon find it’s no big deal at all—and you can finally use all the shades you have lusted after in your eyeshadow palette!
This “Bold Make-Up” post was contributed to The Lady-like Leopard.