LIPSTICK TECHNIQUES: CLASSIC RED, OMBRE, GLITTER

In today’s lesson we tried out a variety of different lip designs including a red lip, an ombre, and glitter lips. This was a really fun lesson which I very much enjoyed since it was very creative. First I'll take a quick look at these trends on the catwalk...

Spring 2013 Couture saw Pat McGrath’s crystal lips hit the runway at the Christian Dior show.

At Kenneth Cole ombre lips were the focal point of the makeup. "The inspiration was a New York urban girl, and we knew we wanted a bold lip," MAC lead artist Romy Soleimani said.

The red lip is always an iconic look on the catwalk, including at the Zac Posen show.

Now back to the lesson...

For health and safety please refer to Health and Safety post". Starting with a clean and primed skin I mixed up a foundation which would be suitable for my model’s skin tone. For this I decided to use MAC Face and Body with a touch of Urban Decay’s Naked foundation. I choose to do this because I felt just Face and Body would have been too pink so Naked foundation brought more warmed the foundation colour. Using only a small amount I buffed it into the skin into almost nothing. For anywhere that needed slightly more coverage like under the eyes or around the nose I used MAC’s Full Coverage foundation.

Having worked with Rachel, my model before on a previous look with eyeliner I wanted to change up the eyeshadow look from the demo and I wanted to see if my liner skills had improved. For the demo Branka choose to do a 50s inspired eyeshadow look using matte colours such as Brulle and Cork. Instead I chose to use shimmery versions of similar colours using my MAC Warm Palette. I think used Aqua Paint to paint on a classic flick liner. I felt more confident in what I was doing when compared to last time. Although I still feel I need more practise I felt like this attempt was far better than the last.

Now running out of time I decided to skip the brows and come back to them if I had the chance at the end. Instead I moved onto the lips using MAC’s Cherry lip pencil topped with a mix of Russian Red and Ruby Woo. To finish the face I done some bronzer and Soft and Gentle highlighter.

Other lip designs I wanted to try out were the ombre lips and glitter lips however I ran out of time for these and as a result I will talk through what Branka done during her demo.

For the ombre lips Branka worked on top of what she had already with the red lips. She used a black eyeliner pencil and lined the lips with it. She next used the lip brush she had previously used to apply the red with and used whatever was left on the brush to go round the edges of the black and soften it – thus creating the ombre. It is at this point the model can slightly rub her lips together helping to blend the two colours. To finished the look Branka used the black eyeliner again to redefine the edges and to further define she applied concealer around the lips to clean it up.

For the glitter lips Branka patted glitter onto the lips. A piece of tape was used to catch any fallout.

Once again, timing was an issue and as a result I wasn’t able to complete two of the lip designs. I’d like to try and recreate these in the near future. For the look I did manage to create I liked how it turned out, especially the eyeshadow which I was slightly hesitant about since it wasn’t something we’d done before. I feel the foundation should have had more coverage and for this I could have used Full Coverage and this can be more clearly seen in the photograph with the flash. Overall, I’m happy with what I created – I just need to work on my timings.