The Makeup No-No's

Part Two: What Not To Wear On Your Face...

1. Ring around the lipstick. Whose idea was it to borrow their eye makeup for their lips? Seriously: dark lipliner is a good look on ONE day of the year: Halloween. The other 364, no, no, NO! Match your lipliner to your natural lip color. Don't line outside your natural lip- we can tell as your lipstick fades during the day. Line, fill in with liner, and add lipstick or gloss. Pretty.

2. Wrong colored foundation. Most drugstores let you return makeup that didn't work for you. Department stores and stores like Sephora and Ulta have testers for EVERYTHING, so there is no excuse for this. Get the right color, and BLEND into your jawline. Don't be that girl walking with an obvious line along her chin where she stopped the foundation, and then her neck is lighter- yuck.

3. Streaking. And I don't mean through the quad. If you're bad at using self tanner, go to the tanning place and get a spray tan, or be more patient and use those moisturizers with self tanner in them. The more gradual the color development, the less streaking there will be.

4. Similarly, don't turn yourself orange from overdoing it in the spray tan booth. This has never been attractive, and I can't imagine who told these girls that it looks good. You look like you ate too many carrots. We're shooting for golden brown.

5. Poorly chosen lip color. This is kind of a big deal to me. Figure out if you have warm or cool undertones - we'll touch on this in a future post, I promise, but meanwhile, ask the girl at the makeup counter. If you have cool undertones, warm coral lipstick isn't for you. You will look like a clown. While I'm on the topic, no lipstick on the teeth! Take your finger, put it in your mouth, and draw it out through your lips to pull off excess lipstick. Done.

6. Giant fake eyelashes- when you're not in costume. I have to say, I kind of blame VH1 for making these even more popular, but if you must wear falsies, wear the most natural ones you can, or go for the little tufts of 3 at a time instead of the whole strip. The really REALLY huge ones look simply ridiculous. Unless you're in costume a la ScarJo in The Spirit, skip these.

7. Eyeliner overkill. Before 10pm, let's keep our look relatively natural.

8. Matching your eyeshadow to your outfit. Coordinating is one thing. Enhancing and accenting, I'm all for. But, if you're shirt is orange, and orange eyeshadow isn't something you would otherwise wear, what the heck are you thinking? Now, if you're wearing a lavender top and you normally have a violet-hued accent color in your eye quad (i use a violet shadow as a liner) go ahead. Just don't do the whole, color wash over the lid to match your top look. Yuck.

9. Extra long or extra thick fake nails. We shouldn't be able to tell that they're fake. My nails suck- really. They're thin, brittle, peel easily, not smooth, flat and wide. I used to get fake nails put on- in high school. Not so much anymore. It's expensive over time, and more hassle than it's worth to me to deal with the upkeep, but moreover, they didn't look natural in the least bit. I see girls walking around with obscenely long nails- I can't imagine how they don't get hurt several times a day OR how they accomplish anything at all.

10. Dry skin! It's possible I go overboard on this one, because I've been known to have a tiny bit of a compulsive moisturizing problem, but come on- a bottle of Jergens is what, three dollars? Dry, flaky skin looks yucky on your body, gets on your dark clothes and looks just gnarly, and makes you itch, which is never attractive. And take care of your face, too- flaking foundation isn't pretty either!