Charlee Baxter Make Up Artist: Contour and Highlight!

Contouring and Highlighting-

During the last few years contouring has become a huge craze across the world because of a certain someone, Kim Kardashian. The world went crazy after seeing a video of her make up artist showing us 'How to look like Kim' but of course, Kim and her team didn't come up with this craze. Contouring and highlighting has been around for ever, its common use was for Drag Queens to sculpt their face to make it seem more feminine.

Scott Barnes. Kim Kardashian. Date Unknown. Viewed 24/10/14. Available at:

- http://la.racked.com/archives/2012/09/05/this_is_how_la_makeup_artist_scott_barnes_does_kim_ks_face.php]

Contouring is an amazing way to transform ones face, with the use of dark cremes and powders around 2 shades darker than your normal skin color, you can make your face appear more structured by creating a shadow or more depth.

Jaw lines and cheek bones are stronger, the nose is slimmer, lips are plumper and the forehead gets smaller. These are some of the things this amazing trick can do, and that's exactly what it is! we trick a persons eye and the lens of a camera to think that our face is more structured and perfect than it actually is. So clever!

Its not all that easy, knowing the structure of the bones in our face really helps you to contour correctly, especially when we come across different faces everyday! we are all different.

Highlighting-

Highlighting is the opposite to contouring, instead of creating depth in the face we want to highlight our best features and bring them forward.

Highlighting is a skill also popular because of Kim K but again, wasn't founded by her and her make up artists. Highlighting is when you take a lighter creme/powder product 2-3 shades lighter than your skin tone, you then apply this to the bridge of the nose, cupids bow, the brow bone, forehead and the cheek bone, this then creates a healthy glow to the face and brings out those features.

So, contouring isn't just for beauty shoots, celebrities and drag queens as mentioned above, Artists use this technique to transform actors into characters and even other people! The abilities an artist has when they have mastered this technique is amazing, for example Angelina Jolies 'Maleficent' was created with the use of prosthetic's and contouring.

Here are a few examples of contouring and highlighting I have done..