I was always told that I couldn't wear eye shadow, or, much eye shadow, because I have hooded eyelids. Having hooded eyelids basically means that you have a fold of skin that hangs over the crease of your eye, getting in the way of where you'd normally put your eye shadow. Because of this, I've always heard that I couldn't have any fun with eye shadow, or I couldn't do winged liner, or a cut crease, whatever. That, because of my hooded lids, my options for eye looks were few, simple, and boring.
But that isn't true — all I had to do was decide that: no, I am going to wear eye shadow and eyeliner, and I am going to make it work. And that's so much of what makeup is, making things work for you and your face. The truth is, you can look at all the face charts on earth, watch every tutorial, read every article, and while those things can be very helpful, you're only going to find what really works for you by doing it on yourself, over and over, until you get it right (which you will, I promise).
The annoying issue with my hooded lids, is that when I apply eye shadow on my lid and into my crease and then look directly into the mirror, the hood of my lid basically hangs over my crease and lid, obstructing all the hard work I just did. If I put a shimmer on the lid and looked directly at you, you'd never see it. Now, is this the end of the world? No, but it is a bummer. With another new eye shadow being released every week and all of those double cut crease tutorials just mocking me every time I creep over to YouTube, I finally resolved to make eye shadow work for me. I'm a smart guy, I can do this, right?
Right. So, the main thing I learned, and the hardest obstacles to get over, is that, when you're applying eye shadow, you're not focusing on your actual eyelids — you're focusing on all of the space around your eye. Applying shadow out to the tail of your eyebrow, halfway to your brow bone feels crazy at first, I know, but once the whole look is done, it actually makes sense and looks beautiful. Doing your shadow this way always feels super dramatic but the end result is always lovely. Trust me, it comes together. It's an illusion.
1. How to Do a Smoky Eye With Hooded Eyelids
Let's start with the standard smoky eye. I'm only going to use three colors to build the eye and create dimension. Three colors are all you really need: a light, a medium, and a dark, but don't tell them I told you that.
So to begin, the most important rule is to always look at yourself straight on in the mirror when doing this eye makeup. I know we're prone to tilting our head and closing our eyes and all that, so we can actually see where we're applying the shadow, but when you're done, look at yourself straight on. This ensures that you'll be able to see the shadow you just applied. If you find that your hooded lid is obstructing the shadow you just applied, don't worry. Just take the shadow up higher onto your crease, even up to your orbital bone, or out past your outer corner a little more. The goal is always to see the shadow looking straight at your reflection. If you can't see it, just add more. More is more, remember that.
I started off with setting my eye primer with a matte shade close to my skin tone. This helps give the rest of my shadows a smooth base and helps everything blend out better. Then, I took a lavender shadow and brushed that all over the lid. A lavender shadow alone doesn't have the most pop on the eye, but it will get there once we start building.
For this shade, and for almost every other shade, I'm dragging them out past my outer corner. I'm doing this so when I open my eye and look straight ahead, my blending work will still be visible.
Next, I worked my main color into the crease. Since this is going to be a purple smoky eye, I used a rich purple. Now, people without hooded eyes can pop this color into their crease and be on their way. Must be nice. But us hooded eyelid-owners have to take it up and buff it out onto the brow bone and out past our outer corner for it to be visible. This is the only way that everyone will actually be able to see all your hard work.
Once I've buffed that color into, around, and above my crease, here's a move that completely changed the game for me: Take the color down to your lower lash line. Groundbreaking, I know. I was always afraid to do this because I thought it would appear to make my eyes droop and look too dramatic, but it does completely the opposite. Aside from making your statement color more visible, it helps you marry your lower lash line up into your crease color, drawing their eye upward and making your eye look bigger, more blended, and helping everything pop more. I swear to god.
See? Look into my dead eyes and see how my lower lash line really makes the purple pop.
Don't believe me? Just try it with a soft transition shade that you're used to using and go from there. You might be surprised. I was. After I've added color to my lower lash line, I deepened up my crease and continued to create the shape of my eye with the main color. After that, I add my darkest color into my crease and on the outer corner of my upper and lower lashes to really carve the eye out and create depth.
Now, this is the step where you really need to be careful, because a dark shade can really throw a whole look sideways if you add too much too soon. Just like the other steps, add little by little and blend. You can always add more, but dark shades are hard to take away once they're there. I often use a pencil brush to start with to place the color exactly where I want it and then blend it out with a blending brush, and then repeat. The precision of a pencil brush also does wonders to really define the shape on my eye without it getting lost under my hooded lid.
Once you've got the eye built, shaped, and defined, you can add whatever shimmers you want to the lid and go wild. Truthfully, I'm not really about shimmers most of the time, I love a nice, matte eye. But I will say that shimmers are a great trick that helps everything look even more blended and uniform.
See?
Now, look at me looking at you. You can see that the shadow extends far beyond my actual eyelid and lash line. It goes past my outer corner almost all the way to the tail of my brow, but it works to create the shape of a smoky eye around my hooded lid, almost disguising it entirely.
See what I mean? Once you get the hang of this you can play with more shades to see how mixing finishes can create a more multi-dimensional smoky effect.
2. The Halo Eye for Hooded Eyelids
There is nothing better than a good halo eye. They give your eyes depth and dimension like nothing else can, and when you have hooded eyes, they completely change how your face looks. Essentially, you're doing a smoky eye, but instead of darkening and smoking out your outer corner, you're doing it to both your inner and outer corners. The depth on each side of the eye with a bit of shimmer in the middle creates a halo effect.
The trick here, for me, is to utilize the space in and around the inner corner of my eye as much as possible, and I use a lot of it. I cover the inner third portion of my eye socket with shadow, basically up to the bridge of my nose and onto my inner brow bone. If it seems like overkill, I get it, but adding color there opens up that portion of the eye and makes it appear like you have more space than you do. Hooded eyes — what hooded eyes?
So this time I did a fiery orange halo eye. Again, I started with setting my primer with a matte base and then dusted a soft peach color all over the inner and outer corners of my lid, anywhere I was going to put shadow, so…everywhere except the center of the eye. I like to keep the center as bare as possible so I can really focus on the halo shape. You can be generous with this shade because this is how we're creating the shape of the eye. We'll be adding color in smaller and smaller intervals, so don't worry.
From there, I took a brighter orange and focused it within the original light orange, deepening both sides of the eye.
If you look, you'll notice that I don't blend any shadow over the top of the lid at this point. That comes later. It looks like these take a lot of adding and blending out and adding and then blending out again, so I like to keep the color concentrated on where I'm deepening it and then blend it through the crease over the lid at the very end.
Next, I took a juicy reddish-orange and deepened the look up even more.
Then, I grabbed my pencil brush and dipped it into my darkest color again to chisel out both sides of the eye.
As you can tell, I took the darkest shade out in the shape of a teeny tiny wing, just to add a bit more shape and structure to the eye. This also works to disguise and minimize the hood of your eye. Don't get me wrong, hooded lids are nothing to be ashamed of or try and hide; this just works to create a new eye shape because makeup is magic.
Finally, the shimmer. I used a yellow gold with an orange flex and popped it right in the center of the lid with my finger, which is always the best way to apply shimmers, in my opinion.
Ugh, halo eyes are just…that girl. Truly. And the good thing about them? They're kind of like nail art — they can be imperfect, but as long as they're uniform, you can make a few mistakes and they'll still look great and no one will pick up on it. It's your world. With any eye look, it just takes patience and blending.
Finally, the most elusive and most difficult for those with hooded lids…
3. Applying Winged Liner to Hooded Eyelids
Now, this is one of those things that no one can teach you. Helpful hints and tips are great, but I never really got it until I just started really doing it on my eye, over and over again.
Not to be repetitive, but when you're doing a wing, do it looking straight on in the mirror. Don't pull your lid up or over. I know that seems to help get a nice, clean line, but it also stretches your skin, so the line you're drawing will not be the line you end up with. When you let go of your skin after pulling it back to draw the wing on, it shrinks back to its normal state, giving you less surface area than you had when you drew on the wing, thus, making the wing droop. It's sort of like drawing a happy face on a balloon and then deflating it.
The one thing about wings that people will tell you, and that I believe is true, is that you never want them to sink below your lower lash line, because that will make it look like the wing is pulling your eyes downward. Winged liner is supposed to give you a more elongated eye, lifted, feline, cat-eye sort of look, you know? But tugging on your eye while drawing on your liner is a surefire way to leave the wing hanging below your lash line, which can make your eyes look like they're drooping downward.
See, even as I say that, my Twitter makeup crush Bella, @Necromancing, absolutely bodied this big wing that does, indeed, sink a bit below their lower lash line, and look at how amazing that looks. They made it work. I've been thinking about that photo for literal months. Just goes to show: your face, your rules.
There are a lot of different ways to draw on a fantastic-looking wing, though. Sometimes I like to draw my wing up toward the tail of my brow for a super lifted look, sometimes I like to draw them almost straight out. Experiment and find what you like. Here's one way I do mine.
I start with some soft shadow to sculpt the lid shape, nothing crazy.
Using a cream pigment and a stiff angled brush, I first line my top lash line.
I create the line pretty thin toward my inner corner, making it only slightly thicker going out.
From there, I draw a wing starting from my lower lash line, almost straight out.
This is the line that it's important to nail. However you draw it, try to make sure it's angling up or going straight out. I know it seems like both of the lines that create the wing should have a soft curve to them, but I always find the wing looks better when the bottom line is straight.
Then, I draw a top line to create the full wing.
Depending on the angle of your bottom line, your top line can have a soft curvature to it, which helps make a nice swoosh effect, or it can remain pretty straight. Since my wing is shooting more outwards than upwards, I kept both lines more straight than curved, connecting the top line to the line I drew on my lid.
There are a billion ways to draw a wing. Super thick, super thin, some can even take up your whole eyelid and take the place of eye shadow, which always looks awesome. Once you get the hang of it, it really is up to you.
So, if you have hooded lids, you can still knock out an eye look as well as any of those ungrateful people with lid space the size of a garage door, it's just a matter of figuring out how. Don't be afraid to experiment, use the space around your eye, and use more shadow than you normally would. It's all good. It always comes together in the end. And the best part? It's just makeup, it comes off, and you can do it all again tomorrow.
Source: Read Full Article