Back to Basics: Highlighting and Strobing for Beginners
Both strobing and highlighting are two “old timer” techniques used by makeup artists the world over, but as with most hidden treasures, both have been leaked and popularised by beauty bloggers and are currently riding the makeup popularity wave. Here’s a bit of advice on how to incorporate both of these revolutionary techniques into your makeup routine.
What’s the big deal with highlighting and strobing?: Both techniques “highlight” prominent facial features, including cheekbones, the bridge of the nose, brow bones and the chin,facial features, which quite honestly, we all wish we were naturally born with.
Highlighting: In general, you want to highlight your raised facial features post-contouring. It’s simply a way of creating a balance between the areas of your face you want to detract light from, by contouring, and areas of your face you want to appear more prominent, with highlighting. For this reason, I’d advise you to check out my post on contouring, which gives step by step instructions on the application process.
Strobing: Unlike highlighting, which is a step in the contouring process, strobing is a standalone makeup application process, which should leave your skin looking dewy, as opposed to matte and with a smooth finish. Basically, it’s freshness that you’re aiming for with this “wet” look and as the summer is finally approaching, this is one technique that is perfectly suited to minimal makeup warm weather months!
Strobing in steps:
- The first thing you want to do to create a dewy look is to moisturise your face with an emollient moisturiser, as this will give your skin a wet appearance, which will perfectly set off the shine in your highlighter.
- As it’s a dewy look that you’re after, the best highlighters to use in this instance are liquid highlighters in pearly and pinky tones. Apply your highlighter as you would when contouring, to the most prominent raised features on your face, such as your forehead, cheekbones and chin.
- If applying foundation, you’ll want to do so after highlighting with a liquid highlighter, by gently stippling small amounts of foundation over your face as not to conceal all the highlighting work you’ve just done!
- Finally, you can apply powdered highlighter on top of your finished look, especially to the forehead, the sides of your nose and the eye area.
So there you have it. Let me know how you do on your contouring and strobing adventures and drop me a message if you have any questions!