How To Become The Contouring Queen!

The aim of contouring is to use light and shade to emphasise depth, create dimension and ultimately achieve a chiselled and slimmer appearance.

If you’ve ever searched the net for contouring tutorials, you may have heard of the ‘Draw two 3’s’ method. Though there is validity behind this idea, the method is pretty generalised and just leads to messy results if used for every face shape.

So instead, we’re following Tina Yong’s viral video titled 'How to Contour for Beginners' to help you craft your perfect facial contour.

First, you want to look in the mirror and figure out which areas you want to pull back and recede.

As Tina mentions, the most popular face shape is the oval. Drawing an imaginary oval on your face is a quick method to figure out which areas should be contoured. Any skin outside of the oval outline should likely be contoured. 

Another common method of figuring out where to contour is doing the “fish sucking” face and following along the area that has been sucked in.

Since Tina is a professional makeup artist, she’d rather not ask her clients to make a silly face – and understandably so!

This is Tina’s preferred method of contouring.

Starting with the cheekbones, Tina lines her contour up from the tip of her ears, stopping where her pupils are.

She then shades along the perimeter of the forehead, concentrating on the sides just above the temples.

To create the appearance of a sharper jawline, she takes her contouring stick along her jawline.

If you want to create the illusion of an even slimmer jawline and prominent chin, you can take the contour a little higher near the mouth as seen below.

Tina opts for a flat brush rather than her blending sponge to maintain precision when contouring her nose.

She lines the sides of the nose starting from the tips of her eyebrows, mentioning that the closer these lines are, the thinner your nose will appear.

If you want your nose to appear lifted, Tina recommends shading underneath the tip to bring it up.

She also demonstrates how she creates the illusion of smaller nostrils by shading the sides of them.

From here on out, all that’s left to do is blend your contour and set it with some translucent powder or a contouring powder to add some further depth.

Ensure that when you blend out your contour, you use dabbing motions instead of dragging motions as this will mess up your hard work.

Follow these steps and you may be crowned the contouring queen.

Good luck!

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Watch the original video below.