Have you ever tried to cover a bruise on your arm or leg with your face makeup? Let me guess, it ended up looking like a weird mess. The color wasn’t right, and it almost made it look more obvious than the bruise did on it’s own. Learn why this is the case, as I help you with some basic fundamentals that will change the way you look at corrective makeup.
episode takeaways
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What You Will Learn In This Episode:
- Regular foundation won’t truly camouflage bruises on your skin
- Color theory principles often come in handy for corrective makeup challenges
- Using a color wheel can assist you if you struggle with understanding what color to use to correct bruises or other marks on your face and body
Picture yourself.
It’s Saturday morning and you are getting ready for a friend’s wedding or a family wedding.
You’ve got your outfit all steamed, hanging up, and it’s at the ready and you walk into that oh, so heavy coffee table, and you get a whopping great bruise right in the middle of your leg on your shin that looks so classy with your knee-length frock, huh?
What to do but grab your foundation and try and cover the bruise that’s fast forming into a lovely crimson tone on your leg.
But the thing is that your foundation isn’t actually going to cover that bruise very well at all.
Or stay on particularly well, either. Do you know why?
Well, it’s one of my favorite topics actually, and that’s simple color theory.
If you put your skin tone foundation on your red bruise (because it’s fresh), it’s going to go a sort of pinkish peach or reddish shade – depending on your skin tone, of course.
Now, if this doesn’t make sense, get yourself a color wheel and it can help you work out what shades you might need to neutralize this reddish look.
Any ideas?
If you said green, well, you’re off to the races because you want to counteract the red tone of the bruise with the opposite or contrasting shade before your skin tone makeup will look right.
There are plenty of drugstore correction makeup options available for this task these days, but I prefer using pro makeup options when doing this sort of thing for body makeup.
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Mainly because I can find products that last all day that are sweat-proof and waterproof.
And once the color correcting and concealing work is done, I can usually just set it and forget it; job done.
So what are my go-tos for this sort of makeup challenge?
I love the Jordane Cream makeup palettes, the Dermacolor Camouflage Palettes, and Endura EBA inks that I airbrush directly onto a bruise.
And the reason I love these so much is that they’re so well-pigmented that you don’t even need to color correct underneath the flesh tone ink. They just go straight on and the bruise is covered.
It may sound like I’m kind of contradicting myself here, but the EBA inks are that good.
And once the ink is dried, just a little powder, a little setting spray, and it will last all day, sometimes two days if everybody’s careful.
Now, while airbrushing is probably not something you’re going to whip out at home before your friend’s wedding, the cream products I mentioned are definitely user-friendly and something you can do at home yourself with a little color theory understanding.
So like I said, find yourself a color wheel below, where I’ll link to a whole bunch of resources such as my blog post about color theory for makeup, the best book on the subject by fellow makeup artist Katie Middleton, and a whole bunch of resources that will help clarify color theory and how you can use it at home, for those last-minute makeup setbacks.
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Resources mentioned in this episode :
Cream Corrective Makeup – Dark Skintone
Cream Corrective Makeup – Light Skintone
