MAKEUP TUTORIAL PART DEUX: AFTER DARK.

OKAY KIDS. Makeup tutorial, part two time! So you did that nice classy cat-eye with the orange lipstick thing earlier in the day, right? And now you just got home from work and are going to, I don’t know, something FABULOUS and you want to look like a grungy alien witch mermaid goth from space in the 90’s or something, yeah? But like you don’t actually want to pull out the blue lipstick like Meg does sometimes because you still want to look sort of like a presentable human, just with rad eye makeup? Like this?

Tumblr has also informed me that I have “partial heterochromia.” Cool!

Cool. So you’re gonna go home, wipe off the rest of that lipstick, and dust a little loose powder over your face to negate any shininess that happened during the day, and maybe fix your brows a bit. And then we’re gonna get started. You’re going to go into the bowels of your makeup box/bin/bag/Kaboodle/whatevz and get:

Black waterproof pencil or gel (not liquid) eyeliner
Grey or dark purple waterproof pencil or gel eyeliner
A matte black eyeshadow
A shimmery, sheer metallic eyeshadow or pigment (white, silver, gold, or bronze)
Black mascara
Lip balm
A little bit of a neutral darker lipstick
A sheer black lip gloss

Ready?

Let’s look at what we’re doing first:

Aren’t you psyched? OKAY. LET’S GO.

STEP ONE: SMUDGE THE CAT-EYE.
Your eyeliner might be a little smudgy already, which is a good thing. Grab a black eyeliner pencil and go over it a little big to make the line softer, smudging a little with your finger if need be. Look up and line the outer half of the bottom of your eye too — not in the waterline, but just below it. Stop at the widest part of your eye. Like so:

STEP TWO: LINE THE REST OF YOUR EYE.

Grab a lighter pencil — I’m using a kind of smoky eggplant purple here, but you could easily do a grey, a smoky blue, or muted olive green, depending on your preference — and fill in your waterline and line the rest of your top lid.

STEP THREE: ADD MATTE BLACK SHADOW.

Remember how in the cat-eye tutorial, I told you to draw a triangle from the tip of the wing to the mid-point on your eyelid? Right, we’re going to do the same thing, but this time,you’re going to grab a matte black shadow (I’m using MAC Carbon here) and an angled brush and draw the line from the tip of the wing straight across until it meets where your eye creases. DON’T blend into the crease or follow the curve, you want a very angular line here. You should blend a little, but don’t go nuts, we’re going to add more so it doesn’t have to be perfect yet. (This will vary depending on the shape of your eyes, but pretty much everyone can do it if you vary the angles a bit.) Then use a small round brush to smudge a little bit of the same shadow under your eye and over all of the areas you’ve lined.

STEP FOUR: GLITTER!
Oh hell yeah! Now we’re getting fun! Grab a light metallic shadow or pigment — I’m using Gareth Pugh for MAC pigment in Guise, but you could use any silver, a frosty sheer white, or even a bronze or gold (which would look gorgeous on darker skin tones.) You want something sheer and with a very fine shimmer — no big chunks of glitter, just something even and shiny and that you can build up the pigments and blend easily. I dig the Gareth Pugh pigment (and other shimmery pigments in general) since it’s got a grey base that means it blends easily with the black and the pigment is super fine so a little goes a long way and it layers easily, but you can vary the colours as you like.

Use a bigger brush to fill in the rest of your eye with this colour, tracing over the whole lid and stopping just at the crease. Blend in to your eyeliner and into the darker outer corners. Dust a teeeeeny tiny bit on your browbone, just below the arch of your eyebrows. Dip a smaller brush in water to help outline the inner corner of your eye and a little bit of the inner corner’s lower lashes. I like to blend some into that weird divot between the side of my nose and my inner eye too (what is this called? anyone?), but I have a pretty deep-set nose bridge. If it looks weird on you, no biggie.

And of course, slap on another coat of mascara.

STEP FIVE: LIPLINER.
You’re gonna look weird for the next two minutes, but that’s okay. Grab a dull purpl-y lipliner — to be honest, I used the same eggplant stuff I used on my eyes, but if it squigs you out to use eyeliner on your lips, just use a similarly coloured liner — and outline your lips as geometric and harsh as you can. Make the bottom lip very round and the lip divot very pronounced. Line it pretty thick — you’re going to blend it in a second, and you want enough pigment to do that.

STEP SIX: BLEND THE LIPS.
Now we’re going to make that stop looking as weird. I put some lip balm on my lips and just a touch of a neutral mauve lipstick and smudged and blotted until the colour evened out. MAC pigments can be blended with lip gloss too, so I dusted a little more of the Gareth Pugh silver pigment on my lips to get a creepy grey 90s frost kind of feel.

STEP SEVEN: GLOSS.
Even out the lip tone with a sheer black gloss — I used a MAC black glimmerglass from a few years ago that’s been discontinued, but there are plenty of other brands! Black lipgloss sounds like a wacky thing to own but I promise, you’ll end up using it way more than you think. It’s a great way to darken and tone down another vibrant colour, or to amp up a less exciting colour.