How to match your makeup to your style type
Part of the epidemic of people disliking their facial features may be due to the tendency to do makeup based on what’s trendy rather than on what enhances our unique features.
When it comes to looking your best, wearing harmonious makeup might be even more important than wearing harmonious outfits. So how can you match your makeup to your style essences?
The intuitive answer is that you can wear any of your significant style essences harmoniously in makeup. For example, if you’re a Dramatic Gamine Ingenue, you’d in theory be harmonious in a Dramatic eye look, a Gamine eye look, an Ingenue eye look, or any combination, like a Dramatic Gamine Ingenue eye look.
However, based on my observations of many celebrities and non-celebrities, the above answer isn’t exactly true.
Case study: Dramatic Gamine Ingenue Emmy Rossum
Emmy Rossum is a Dramatic Gamine Ingenue. But her eyes don’t have significant Dramatic or Gamine—they’re essentially purely Ingenue. So when Emmy does Dramatic Gamine eye makeup (first photo), she appears less harmonious than when she does a purely Ingenue eye look.
This makes logical sense: Emmy’s eyes appear round and sweet, so Dramatic Gamine tightlining—which visually narrows and intensifies the eyes—fights against her eyes’ inherent vibe. So despite that Emmy has a lot of Dramatic and Gamine in her face, she’s not ideally harmonious in Dramatic or Gamine eye makeup.
Similarly, many of us will look most harmonious when we match our makeup to our individual features, rather than to our style type as a whole.
The key principle for harmonious makeup
So the key principle for harmonious makeup is to match the shapes and vibes of your individual features to the shapes and vibes of your makeup.
Facial features with straight-lined essences (Dramatic, Natural, Gamine) are harmonious in makeup applications with straight lines, and facial features with curving essences (Romantic, Ethereal, Ingenue) are harmonious in makeup applications with curving shapes. Features with Classic will be harmonious in conservative, polished makeup—nothing dramatically curving or sharp.
You can also be much more nuanced to achieve greater harmony—for example, the Romantic essence is characterized by large circles that appear voluminous and 3D, so people with Romantic eyes will want to create volume with eye makeup such as by using shimmery shadow (and avoiding overly matte textures) to produce the illusion of greater dimensionality. They can also employ other techniques such as strategically applying shadows and highlight to further emphasize the eyes’ curves.
When to do makeup based on your style essences
Do I recommend that every day for the rest of your life you only wear makeup that’s harmonious with your individual features?
No—or only if you want. Some people may want to look their most harmonious every day, whereas others may want to look their most harmonious only on special occasions. Neither is right or wrong.
I do think that for many people, matching their individual features to their makeup really can be a game-changer for making them feel they look their best. It may also help you look your best in unexpected ways.
Makeup can change even the features you don’t apply makeup to
For example, many people don’t apply noticeable makeup directly to their nose, but your eye and lip makeup may affect how you feel about your nose.
If you have round eyes and a round nose and get into a habit of doing heavy matte angular eye or lip makeup, you may find that your nose appears too large or round by comparison.
However, if you do softer, more blended and rounded eye makeup, you may find that you suddenly like your nose more, because its roundness and softness now harmonizes better with your eyes.
The above effect can be seen here on Romantic Ethereal Gamine Kat Dennings. Kat’s beautiful soft rounded nose is more harmonious on her face when surrounded by similarly soft makeup. (Like Emmy, Kat is an example of a celebrity who has Gamine but isn’t harmonious in heavily Gamine makeup.)
Part of the epidemic of people disliking their facial features may be due to the tendency to do makeup based on what’s trendy rather than on what enhances our unique features.
What if you want to follow makeup trends?
But doing makeup by your style essences doesn’t mean you can’t follow trends. If you learn your most harmonious makeup styles, you can find trends that fit with your essences, or modify trends to better suit you.
And of course, you’re never obligated to follow any style recommendations for your type, so if you love a makeup trend that doesn’t fit with your essences, feel free to wear it anyway! Style analysis guidelines only have to be as strict as you want them to be.
Is your face the sum of its parts?
The idea that we’ll look best by matching our makeup to our individual features illustrates an interesting principle of style analysis: namely, that at least some of the time, the whole is equal to the sum of its parts.
Meaning, if you’re a Dramatic Gamine Ingenue, each of your individual facial features will be some combination of those three individual essences, and some of your facial features may have only one or two of those essences.
The above seems true for many and maybe most people, but there are important exceptions. For example, Angelina Jolie is a Romantic Ethereal Dramatic Classic. She’s on the Romantic Ethereal Dramatic board because in my view those are her top three essences, but I think she also has significant Classic.
Which of her facial features have Classic? In my opinion, none of them. I’ve typed all her features individually, and I don’t think any have Classic.
Instead, I think that the proportions of her face have Classic: the distances between her features rather than her features themselves.
(Importantly, many faces do have Classic features, such as eyes or nose with Classic in them; I just think Angelina’s face is an example of face that has no Classic features but does have Classic proportions.)
So, in my view, a person’s style type is to some extent a sum of their face’s individual features, but there is at least one essence (namely Classic) that can exist not in any feature but instead only in the relationships between the features. This may be true of some or all of the other essences as well, but I’m not currently sure. Something to further examine.
