I have been longing to post a makeup related entry... and I finally got to it.

I am sure you've seen this look everywhere, but I'll be sharing how I do my eye makeup. It might be similar or even the same as someone else's, but below this will be basically about my eye makeup routine. My eyes have epicanthal folds and hooded double eyelids.

The epicanthal fold makes it hard for me to add highlighting eyeshadow colors at the inner corner of my eyes. I can still do it but it can be easily overdone, because the location of the supposedly highlighted inner corner is very near to my nose contour lines. As a result, I prefer to highlight the lower part of the eyes' inner corner. You can also see that I put some eyeshadow on my lower part of my eyes' inner corner.

Eyes like mine have been called as tapered eyelids, half-double eyelids, or maybe just hooded eyelids. However, when I think of hooded eyelids, I think more of someone with parallel double eyelids that is hooded by... "upper eyelid fats". I can't find a term to describe the part of the eyes that overbears the eyelid, and I don't feel like searching for its scientific name.

Okay, continuing on to the makeup part.

My natural makeup look

Available concealer shades

Milani Baked Powder Blush in Corallina shade

Rose Golden Goddess

NYX Eyebrow Cake Powder

Dior '5 Couleurs Iridescent' Eyeshadow - Earth Reflection

Estee Lauder Liquid Eyeliner

In shade 02 Brown

3 Step Volumecara

Estee Lauder Long Lasting Lipstick in Sugar Honey

Look at 'dem lashes!

Close-up look of the finished makeup look

This picture was shot from a lower angle, so you can see my double eyelids, and also how the eyeshadow looks after application + blending.

I don't mean to discredit any brands, and you might even have good experience by using these type of brushes to apply eyeshadow, but from my experience, brushes like this that is branded as "eyeshadow brush" usually don't do very well in applying eyeshadow to your eyelids. I don't know with the brushes in the picture, they may have soft hairs, but I've tried buying a cheap eyeshadow brush (unbranded) with similarly shaped hairs, and it sucks. Also maybe because it's cheap, the brush hairs are quite hard on your delicate eyelids.

If you sweep the brush on the eyeshadow (product), and then try swatching it on your hand, the color looks like it's not pigmented at all and also usually there will be clumps of eyeshadow on where you swatched it. You can trick your way by dipping the brush into the  eyeshadow. The color will usually appear more pigmented that way, but using a brush with different hair anatomy will do the eyeshadows' colors much more justice.

Take the picture as an example, the hairs look stiff and thin. Google Image eyeshadow brush and the top hits will show brushes (mostly branded though..) with nice rounded/elliptical shaped hairs, with the shortest hairs usually at the leftmost and rightmost of the hair, and becomes longer towards the middle, and the hairs are usually of elliptical shape (imagine 3D ellipse), not thin like the ones in the picture. Think only expensive brushes have these hair characteristics? Masami Shouko brushes are generally affordable, and the number 40 brush is just over US$ 4, I bought it for IDR 42900. It does a great job in applying eyeshadow to my eyelids, but as I said, the brushes are sharp so it might be quite a painful application. I can bear with it though, because it'll only take a while to apply eyeshadows.

Continuing on...


If the eyeshadows and eyeliner were drawn into some sort of chart, it would look like this. There's just 4 simple steps to achieving this look. Oh yeah, don't forget your eyelid primer! I'm using Too Faced's eyelid primer.

Number 1 is supposed to be the lightest shade of all the eyeshadows you're going to use. Apply the color all over the lid. After you finish step number 3, you may also reapply the lightest shade in the middle of your eyelid, but don't use too much so the darkened outer V won't get touched by the lightest shade.

Number 2 is second darkest shade. Apply it at the outer V of the eye, and at the hollows of your eyes. Just press your finger/brush gently on your eyelids and you'll find out where your eyeballs 'end'; that's the area of 'the hollows of your eyes'. Applying in this area will make the eyeshadows to have approximately the same shape and size with your eyes. If you apply too much outside the hollows of your eyes, you might look weird and messy.

Number 3 is the darkest shade. Apply only a little amount of product of the "darkest shade" on the outer V and blend towards the center of your eyelid. Make sure to not go overboard towards the center. You can also apply the color in the hollows of your eyes, but just until the middle of the eyes or just a little before the middle of the eyelid.

Number 4 is eyeliner. Here, I applied from the middle of the eyelid, carefully drawing a line on my lash line. No need to tightline, but make it as close as possible to the lash line and extend the line out of the edge of your eye a little bit.




I was using Dior's '5 Couleurs Iridescent' Eyeshadow Palette, so here's a guide to which colors I used. I picked the upper left color as my lightest shade, and the darker shades are the upper right and bottom left colors. I did not pick the lower right pearly white color as my lightest color because the upper left yellowish gold color complimented my skin better. The darker shades aren't exactly very dark, but because of that, it's good for a natural look.

The central pink color is the color I usually use as highlighter. In this case, I only put it on the lower part of my inner corner of the eyes like I said in the beginning of the blog. The pearly white color can also be the highlighter shade for the eye's inner corner.

As for the eyeliner, use whatever type of eyeliner you want-- pencil, gel, or liquid, but it's best to look for a color similar to your eyeshadow so it appears to be "blended together". You can also pull out a natural look even with a black-colored eyeliner, but when you use an eyeliner with a color similar to your eyeshadow's darker/darkest color, it will look very natural, more natural than if you used black eyeliner.

After all has been done, curl your lashes and swipe a good amount of mascara to your lashes!

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So... a mini review on the products I used. Just a piece of my thoughts!

1. My Estee Lauder GelCreme foundation does not make your skin oily for the first few hours. Today it lasted for about 4 hours until it started to feel oily, but I was mostly outdoors and not in a full-AC room. My skin is combination btw, and quite acne-prone. The thing I love about this foundation is, I really liked this shade because it's one of the perfect shades for my skin. I have always been confused whether I'm of warm, cool, or neutral undertone.. if I judge only from the vein test, I'm a neutral, but my skin tone tends to go to the warm side. Yet here I'm using a Cool Creme shade.

2. My HealthyMix concealer is nice, not extraordinarily nice. The packaging is nice though, because it's more hygienic. If I want to cover my dark circles using this concealer, it's best I use an applicator like a brush or sponge. I don't like to use sponge cause I'm lazy, but a foundation brush does a very good job in blending the concealer. Using my fingers will just overblend the concealer and then my dark circles end up still being very evident.

3. Milani Baked Powder Blush is my HG blush so far. I really liked the color payoff and the color itself, because I wanted a coral blush that's not too orange.

4. Rose Golden Goddess Bronzer is not a very good bronzer in my opinion... it's hard to use a brush to get even a small amount of product, so sometimes I use my fingers to swipe over the product and apply it on my cheeks and then blend with brush. If you use your fingers you'll get a decent amount of product with pigmented color, but I want the product to stick to my brush not my fingers. I'm wondering if I had to use a different technique to get the most of the product out to my brush or is it the bronzer's fault. I'll say buy a different bronzer instead-- Physician's Formula makes amazing bronzers.

5. I really like NYX Eyebrow Cake Powder! If I had extra money to spend I'd have bought Dipbrow Pomade by Anastasia Beverly Hills, but for now this'll manage. For a natural look you won't need the "cake" to make the eyebrow powder become gel-like. Even with powder you can get a pigmented brown color to your brows, which is good! And no pain at all. Before the eyebrow cake powder, I used Shiseido's pencil eyebrow liner and it hurt if I don't use foundation to smoothen its application. I don't always use foundation when going out so that's quite a big con. The surrounding skin will be red after I apply the pencil brow liner because it has hard texture. The sad thing is, the pencil brow liner was expensive (Shiseido...), so I'd rather buy other brand's pencil brow liners like from DollyWink-- I used my friend's and it's very soft.

6. My Dior Iridescent Eyeshadow is the first eyeshadow palette that works on my eyes. I used to buy these cheap unbranded eyeshadows and their colors are very poorly pigmented. And then suddenly my mom buys me this palette so I was totally amazed by the difference in quality. The colors stay ALL DAY with primer, forgot how long it lasted without primer.

During a similar period of time, my mom also once gave me an Estee Lauder travel palette (earlier than the Dior) but the eyeshadow colors were too nude and barely shows any color on my skin. After buying Dior palette, I concluded that my eyes need more expensive palettes/eyeshadows because it will withstand the constant movement of my "eyelid fats" on my eyelids (which will cause oil secretion.. yeah. Constant skin contact will cause it). I have tried many other eyeshadows but still, if you want to splurge on a nice eyeshadow, I recommend Dior's 5 Color Eyeshadow palette. They recently launched the Fall collection and I'm in love with the red, but if only I could easily afford it...

7. Estee Lauder's liquid eyeliner is really good. Very good. And I love the brown shade... it's a natural brown shade and it's such a shame they don't sell it in Indonesia--they only have the black one. I like the brown so much I'd rather not even buy the black shade liquid eyeliner.

The brown shows on pictures, with shiny finish, and then the felt tip applicator of the eyeliner is soft so it doesn't hurt your eyelids. A review on this, by Beautiful with Brains here, same link with my picture source, says exactly what I think about this eyeliner.

I have experience with bad liquid eyeliners, so I dare say that Estee Lauder's is really good. I once tried Maybelline's liquid eyeliner (old one) and it HURT. I threw the eyeliner away after 2-3 uses because I can't stand the pain. I also had experience with irritations from using Sephora's liquid eyeliner.

8. 3 Step Volumecara is one of my HG mascara! We don't have GreatLash mascara here in Indonesia so this is one good alternative! Have fun experimenting with the mascara as you can spin the middle part of the bottle to switch steps-- look at the mascara's reviews done by beauty bloggers and see how amazing it is. My lashes are super duper sparse and thin, and this mascara does great results, which I say is comparable with Benefit's They're Real mascara. One thing to look out though, you might want to buy these mascaras from online shops that import products from Korea or the resellers, because you'll save so much money. In the retail Etude House shops the price is about 200% to 300% more expensive-- I remember my friend saying it's around US$30++ (IDR 400k ish) while you can get them for just around US$13 (IDR 160k ish).

9. Estee Lauder lipsticks. I love them. It depends on what kind of colors you're looking for though-- I just happen to like many of Estee Lauder's very much. Sugar Honey is a "my lips but better" color, and is my lifesaver when I have heavy eye makeup. I think the color is discontinued but I haven't checked with the counters in Indonesian Estee Lauders yet. I hope it's not discontinued!

Edited this post a little bit. Whew, that was a long post. I hope you don't get bored reading my rants. And I hope this post could help you in some way, especially those of you who just started doing makeup or have eyes that are similar to mine. Remember, you don't have to use exactly same colors as I do; I use the same technique for other colors as well, and even with darker colors it still looked natural because when my eyes are open most of the colors won't be seen anyway! :')  Anyways, enjoy! :-) Cheers!