How To Contour and Highlight Your Face

I love to experiment with makeup. I’m not a makeup artist but I’ve always wanted to be one. I could spend hours on the computer watching makeup videos. One of the things I’ve started doing in the last year is to contour and highlight my face.

Contouring and highlighting has been around a long time. What does it actually do? It helps sculpt your face to enhance your natural shadows and bone structure.

Here are the areas I contour and highlight (I do this after I’ve applied my foundation):

How to contour & Highlight your face

  • To slim your nose: apply a contouring shade on each side of your nose, blending carefully, and the highlighter down the center of your nose. (I just highlight my nose most of the time but contouring on each side will slim your nose.)
  • To enhance the cheekbones: suck in your cheeks, apply a darker shade to the hollows and a highlighter to the top of the cheekbones. Then apply blush as normal. 
  • To contour the forehead: apply a light bronzer to each temple and blend upward. This will create a shadow effect causing the head to look more rounded. Highlight in the center above the brows.
  • For a small, thin chin: apply highlighter to the center of the chin, directly under the center of the lip.
  • To minimize a double chin which starts to happen as we age: apply bronzer along the jaw line and blend it down, towards your neck. This creates depth and helps to strengthen the jaw line.

Make sure you blend these in, you don’t want to walk around looking like my picture! 🙂

Here are the products I use to contour and highlight: {Disclosure: Please know that if you make a purchase using a link on this page, I may earn a commission and I am very grateful for your support of this site. Thank you.}

I use Bahama Mama for contouring. It works great for most skin types.

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For highlighting I use MAC Prep +Prime Highlighter.

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Do you contour and highlight your face? Have you tried it?

Beauty for the Heart~~ I was reading in Psalms this week and came across this verse, Psalm 130:5a (NLT), I am counting on the Lord; yes, I am counting on him. It reminded me of how my husband often prays those words this way, “God we are counting on you!”

What situation today are you counting on God? Tell him and he will listen!

Have a blessed day!

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  1. I have a friend who swears b contouring and highllighting, but I’ve never felt the need, so haven’t tried it.. I believe she said there are tutorials on you tube as well. I think these techniques are especkally helpful as we age…

  2. I sooo do not spend enough time on my makeup. I don’t even wear mascara any more. I could use a makeover! I’m just afraid of getting 15 different products and increasing ‘get ready’ time by 15 minutes.

  3. What a great visual, Cyndi! I have both contour and highlight and now I can properly apply it! So simple now that I know! Thanks!

  4. I like the look of that Mac product… it reminds me of me YSL “clicker” that I have bought faithfully for 25 years…..But, I am so pale that if I put a darker color anywhere on my face I would look like a clown. ha!

  5. Thanks you so much for this tutorial on contouring the face, my son is getting married this Sat. 22nd and this will really help me for doing makeup!