Makeup Tutorial: Date Night

I figure ivory is a good counterpoint to black... 

This was going to a bit earlier in the month, on Valentine's day, to be precise, but it wasn't ready. This is a makeup tutorial recreating the makeup design I wore to the dinner date with Raven that we had to celebrate three years of us being together, earlier on this month! As I wore a ruffled satin blouse and floor-length skirt, and my curly black wig, I wanted something to break up pillar of black effect, so opted for ivory lace gloves and pearls, and thus consequently, ivory eye-makeup. 

Photographs by SuzyBugs
My hand looks awkward because my thumb nail is actually bandaged.

I didn't get chance to photograph my makeup on the actual night, but decided that it definitely needed a step-by-step so recreated it a bit later. You might notice that it is decidedly similar to my last makeup tutorial, and this would be right, but this is my preferred style - asymmetric with swirls only on one side. Many thanks to SuzyBugs for photographing me (and I'm not even a spider!).

On to the tutorial itself!

Neatly plucked eyebrow and moisturised and primed skin.

Preparation
As always, it is important to start by preparing your face. First of all, wash your face, then carefully pluck your eyebrows and any extraneous facial hair (I find that this is less uncomfortable after I've washed). Moisturise your skin. Once this is done, apply a good toner. After that, a good primer is essential - go for a very lightly coloured translucent primer. Once the primer has dried, apply concealer. If you don't wait, the concealer is thinned by the primer and does not conceal very well. The three brown moles on my cheek don't conceal very well as they are slightly raised, so I don't bother, personally I think leaving them gives me character as most of the time I am not aiming for a doll-like look. 

Foundation
I used a very light amount of foundation, thickest over my nose and on my face either side of my nose, where I tend to be the pinkest. I then set the foundation with a porcelain-coloured powder, and a light dusting of matte white on my cheekbones, forehead and nose as a highlight. My nose has a tendency towards pinkness and I work to counteract this.

I use Rimmel Kohl pencil; these are my favourite.

Kohl
Starting in the middle, under my lower lashes, and working towards the outer corners I drew in my eyeliner with a soft kohl pencil. I used soft kohl because it goes on quite dark and can be blended outwards with a brush for a smokey effect. I did indeed blend it outwards with a brush, and added a light amount of black eye-shadow as a powder to set it afterwards. I did not do anything to my upper eyelids as working in off-whites and white means that I need to add anything black afterwards to avoid the white getting mucky.

White on the waterline makes my eye look larger.

White Waterline
I added white to the lower waterline to help give me the illusion of larger eyes. This is done carefully with a white eye pencil. I also add just a little bit to the inner corner of my eye, where it meets my nose, to help give me the illusion of a slightly narrower nose or slightly further apart eyes (depending on which way you see it), and to contrast nicely with the black eyeliner I applied later.

Cream eyeshadow near the inner corner, white towards the outer.

Eyeshadow
This is was relatively simple and I only used two colours - a matte creamy off-white and white with a very slight amount of shimmer. Before I got that far, I primed my eyelids, as I wanted a dense colour that would last. You can get special eye-makeup primers, but I use my regular primer with no issues. I used an eye-shadow sponge (the kind with the nice long handle, like a brush) and started with the cream colour, working from the inside corner of my eyelid to the middle, and patting it on rather than sweeping in order to keep it dense, then I used the white eye-shadow from the outer corner inwards to the middle and carefully blended them, trying not make them patchy in the process. I then took a small fluffy brush and added a dusting of the cream eyeshadow out along my brow bone and out to my temples. At this point it is done symmetrically, but once I decide which side the swirls will go on, I add slightly more to that side in order to give a nice contrasting creamy base for the black swirls.

Eyeliner
I use a dip eyeliner with a fine brush tip to first of all line my upper lid, then draw narrow 'cat-eye' tails at each outer corner. The eye-lining is decidedly wider towards the outer corner. I draw a very narrow line on my lower lids, coming down slightly as I approach the inner corner in order to add to the illusion of larger eyes. 

Still needs more swirls...

Swirls
At this point I pick which side will have swirls, add a touch more cream eyeshadow, and draw the swirls on. The brush tip is what allows for the calligraphy-like variation in line thickness and clean swirls. My skin is not as smooth as it once was, and I do sometimes have to go back and touch up any patchy sections. One thing I have to make sure of in the preparation stage is that there are no fine, almost invisible hairs on my temples, because if eye-liner gets on them, they become instantly very visible! Swirls are tricky, but it just takes practice. Doing them with either a gel or liquid eyeliner and brush or a brush-tipped eyeliner makes them so much easier. I tend to go for finer, more intricate swirls, but Adora BatBrat often does good examples of what can be done with bolder strokes. 

I added a couple more swirls in...

Mascara
Mascara is the last step. As you may have seen in the photos above, I am lucky enough to have fairly long and curly lashes anyway, so do not curl them, but if you want to, you can.

As before, yes, I do have naturally grey eyes, and they are not contact lenses. If you look at all my photographs you will see that I do indeed have grey eyes, but in this set the lighting makes them seem slightly darker than normal. 

Makeup Tutorial: Foliate Swirls

I see a lot of babybat goths with just a heap of black eyeliner and then some incoherent squiggles at the corner, and it seems that a lot of people think this is the limit to swirly eyeliner designs, and that they cannot ever look good. Personally, I think that it is possible to have swirls that look good. This tutorial was actually based on a request by Raven (not my partner, a different Raven) commenting on ::this post::. It is not the same makeup as worn in that post, but hopefully it will be helpful, and I will also do a complete tutorial for that look (with variant swirls; I can't exactly replicate them) at a later point.

You will need:
✥Primer and foundation to match your skin tone
✥Matt white eyeshadow
✥Black soft kohl pencil
✥Felt-tipped eyeliner pen
✥Silver liquid eyeliner
✥Metallic silver eyeshadow
✥Metallic pewter eyeshadow
✥Black eyeshadow.
✥Brush-tipped liquid liner.

Apply primer and foundation.

The first step is to prime and apply foundation. As this design itself is quite heavy, I have applied primer and a very sparing amount of foundation under my eyes to act as concealer, and a tad of actual concealer over the worst of the bags under my eyes. Too much foundation and heavy looks can appear caked. I'm relatively pale naturally, and am using tinted primer and foundation that approximately match my skin tone. If you look very carefully at the roots of my eyebrows, you can see where some has clumped and that it's actually a tad yellower than my actual skin tone. Don't forget to set the nose and the rest of the face with powder, but don't set the foundation around the eyes.

Apply matt white eyeshadow.

The next step is to add some strong matt white eye-shadow under the brow line, and then to dust some lightly across the cheeks and above the brow line, forming a 'C' shape around the outside of the eye on the bony parts of the face. This is basically for the purpose of highlighting the contours and to contrast better against the black that will be added later in this look. I use a matt white at this point because a shimmer or pearlescent white would have the wrong lustre for the highlights.

Add kohl under the eye.

The third stage is creating a shadowy effect under the eye. Firstly line below the lashes with a soft, smudgy kohl pencil, then with either a cotton-bud (q-tip) or the edge of your little finger, smudge the kohl outwards and downwards. Try to get it to fade out smoothly. Be careful at the point where you meet with the upper lid not to get black on the outward continuation of the crease of the upper lid. Afterwards, take a felt-tipped black eyeliner pen (NOT a felt-tip pen!) and go over the kohl right up against the lashes. Emphasises the extension of the upper lid's crease by drawing in the downward curve with the same liner. You want to be drawing in the crease, below the upper lid. The idea is to give the illusion of a longer upper lid and therefore longer eye.

Apply and blend eyeshadows.

This stage is most fun! First of all cover the upper lid up to the crease formed by the curvature of the eyeball with liquid silver eyeliner. You want to pick a really metallic shade. I have gone over this with Rimmel metallic silver eyeshadow and then metallic pewter eyeshadow in the corner in order to set the liquid eyeshadow. Draw in the crease with the kohl pencil, and dab over it with black eyeshadow to set. Apply the pewter eyeshadow between the white from earlier and the black. Using a narrow but fluffy-ish brush, blend the outwards to the brow from the black. Begin pencilling in the eyebrow.

Add swirls and line upper lid.

The next step is fun when you get the hang of it, but requires practice. Take a liquid eyeliner with a brush tip and line the upper lid narrowly over the silver and draw in your swirls. Practice drawing swirls before going out with this. If you use a a brush-tipped liner you can get a variation in width of line when you change the angle. End a few of the lines with tapering ends, or with curls that form dots, practice drawing stylised leaves. I tend to have the swirls emerge from the lower lid line and the extension of the corner, and then have one emerging at the end of the crease following the curve of the lower lid. These swirls are going to have silver on them in the next step so I have included a few broad sections that look a little odd at this stage. You can stop at this stage if you want a sharper, more minimal set of swirls (my personal preference), or go onto the next for an extra level of fanciness. 

And there, you're done!

The last stage is adding the silver highlights on the black swirls in silver liner. If it bleeds out onto the black, then just line around it again carefully in more black. Just add small sections of silver on the broadest parts of the black swirls. I also added some dots in black liquid liner below the brow and tidied up the drawing in of the brow. I then applied white eyeliner to my lower waterline and applied mascara to both lower and upper lashes. Then you're done! Swirls with silver and snazzy metallic eyeshadow. 

Big hugs and huge thanks to my partner Raven for taking all of the photographs. Hopefully they illustrated all the stages clearly. Raven did a fantastic job considering that I am terrible at being a makeup model on account of being terribly inclined to blink when lights are pointed at my eyes. I did all of the post-processing because it was Raven's turn to cook dinner tonight and I did not want to distract him. 

Makeup Tutorial: Black Lips and Eye-Makeup

This is my first attempt at doing a makeup tutorial. This a traditional, high-contrast Gothic look, suitable to be worn with various styles, or at least I do similar makeup with various outfits. Probably a bit heavy to wear with particularly historical outfits or Lolita inspired outfits, but with a bit of added neon it could form the basis of a cyber look. I tend not to wear false eyelashes unless out clubbing, so there's no instructions on that.

First of all, pluck/wax. I have dark, thick hair. My eyebrows grow back insanely fast, I have finer brown-ish hair on my upper lip that gets waxed, and coarse black hairs and coarse red (there aren't any redheads in my family, so I'm not sure how this happened) grow out my chin, and those get plucked. I have practically no eyebrows, those also get plucked. I use a thin line of natural hairs as a guide for fancier drawn ones. Some people like to wax/pluck after washing their face, but I think washing my face afterwards helps soothe any soreness.

Secondly, wash your face. This gets rid of flaky bits and helps reduce oily patches that can make your foundation go strange while wearing. If you had eye-makeup on the previous day, give your eyes an extra clean with some eye-makeup remover, because you don't want any mascara or eyeliner residue getting dragged into your foundation.

I am rather pale and slightly ruddy with dry skin, so I'd normally moisturise with a moisturiser that includes some sun protection. I am a sunscreen in winter sort of person, I burn and then develop freckles in sunlight, and my freckles like turning into moles, so I try my best to avoid that. I have three brown moles on my cheek, and a pink 3D one that sprouts hairs under my lip. My nose tends towards being oily, the rest of my face is really dry. I do not understand this strange quality of my nose! Once moisturised, use primer that turns your face into a nice blank, smooth canvas for makeup. My primer is sadly still in the bathroom back in England. Oops. 

Wash, moisturise, prime.

This is me having washed my face and done the above steps. You can actually see the pink on my nose where the skin changes and tends towards being oily! I have a scarf on my head because I couldn't find the box with all my hairbands in, and wanted to keep my hair out of my eyes.

The next step is to conceal blemishes and on your lips, then apply foundation. I use a porcelain and white, and blend them on my face rather than the back of my hand because my hands are ruddier than my face. This is not making my face much paler than it is, but does take out a lot of the pink/red tones, especially on my nose. I deliberately got my partner to take a photo of only half of my face done to show the change and to show the two foundations on my face. I tend to use more white in the foundation around my eyes because it contrasts with the black and provides extra vibrancy when I'm wearing colours.

Apply foundation.

Make sure to blend your foundation really well, onto your ears, down your neck and into your hairline. There was re-adjustment of that scarf between this photo and the next. After primer, foundation is exactly what it is - the foundation of your makeup, so you want to get this bit right. Don't go too pale unless you're well practised and covering all exposed skin. 

Next powder your face for a good finish, and highlight the tops of your cheek bones and rim of your eye-socket. I then used some shimmer powder on the cheek highlights and went under my eyebrow with slightly pearlescent white eyeshadow. The white eyeshadow is for contrast later. I do the highlights with a brush. I'm using large, soft watercolour brushes (and cleaning them well afterwards!) to do this because my proper makeup brushes also got left behind. Oops. I'm not using my art brushes for any cream, liquid, or other non-powder makeups because I want to use those brushes for art sometime, and I'm using them from new, they were cheap ones I bought in Hobby Craft or something. If they've had paint on them, I wouldn't advise using art brushes near your eyes. 

Powder your face

The next stage is the lips. Line them in black. The concealer applied earlier gives a neat edge to the lip makeup, and lining the lips first helps stop the lipstick from spreading. Use a decent black lipstick, not halloween makeup. I do mine in a first coat which I blot thoroughly, wait until it has set, then do a second coat and blot that, and then use lipstick sealer because with dark shades like black it shows and looks awful if it starts coming off. 

Line, colour and seal your lips.

The next stage is the eye makeup. As this isn't straightforward for me to explain in text, this has several photographs. The first stage is kohl under the lower lashes. I put kohl about two-thirds of the way to my nose and then blur it downwards and outwards for a smokey look. Don't do the lower waterline with kohl. It might take a couple of layers to get it smokey enough. I use kohl rather than eye shadow powder to avoid bits falling on my cheeks. If you want to, you can contour your cheek-bones with contouring powder at this point. Doing it very dramatically with angular lines is very 1980s, but I prefer a softer look. 

Apply smokey kohl under the eyes

The next step is to line your eyes in a cat-eye style with liquid liner at the top and outiside corners of your eyes. I use liquid liner by Rimmel as it has a really good application tip on the bottle and is les cumbersome than painting it on. Once that is done, use white pencil on your lower waterline to make your eyes look wider in order to counter-act the effect of wearing such dark makeup. I put a bit of white eye pencil on the inner corner of the eye, too. I think I actually did a tad too much this shot, so in the subsequent ones I'd blended it out as it looked a little strange. 

Apply liquid liner and white eye pencil.

The next stage I should have taken more photos, really, but I will have to do my best to explain in words.   I used three eyes-shadows for this, the white, a silver and a black. For this I used a double-ended applicator and my highlighting brush.  With the black I used a brush to go along the top of the eye-liner, and then using one side of the sponge tip, put black into the corners of the upper lid near my nose,. Then, using the other side of the sponge tip, I put silver up to the crease, and then using the first brush, not the one I used for the black, but the brush I used to do the highlights at the start, I put a new layer of white at the top, and then carefully blend it into a nice gradient. I'm a big fan of nice gradients. Once that is done, I pencil in my eye-brows. You can do them any shape you like. I'm thinking of doing something a bit squarer next time, as the curve meets up too smoothly with black eyeshadow here. Once that's done I do one last coat of eye-liner, for a crisp edge against the silver, and apply mascara. The "derp" face as my partner calls it, is so you can see the makeup, not because I was mucking around and pulling faces at the camera. 

Apply eye-shadow and pencil in eyebrows.

There you have it! While this process has quite a few stages, I don't think it's a very complicated look to actually do. The only tricky stages are blending the foundation properly and drawing the eye-liner straight. 

Some different angles

I'd like to thank my partner very much for putting up with me typing this blog, and for taking all the photographs. I know our bedroom has hardly got ideal lighting conditions, but I think he did a fairly good job, and I'm not exactly the best model (I do a lot of "derp" faces and blink, and twitch...). My partner is semi-professional and has a ::website::. 

If anyone is interested in what I used, here's a tray with most of the supplies in. Everyone has their own favourite products that work best for them and their skin, so I see little point in listing all my materials. (except to say that Rimmel eyeliner is very good for the price).  I haven't put the preliminary stuff on the tray, as that gets done in the bathroom. That cute little gothic stained glass mirror was a find from Oxfam. Charity shops are one of the best concepts ever. 

Me with a tray full of goodies.