Megan Vigil shows how to contour light to medium skin with ash-toned products using a shadow-only technique that looks like no makeup at all. She layers cream and powder with the Phase 2 brush, extends contour from cheekbones to ears, and sculpts the forehead, chin, and jawline using the rule of thirds. Her go-to palettes are Senna and Lorac.
Okay. So this is where I leave it right now. This is how I set my makeup. Well, you're going to see how I set my makeup, because I want it to be minimal. I don't want it to look like I'm wearing makeup, even though I'm wearing a fucking ton of makeup. Like, obviously my eyes have makeup on them, but my skin, I want it to look like glass. So talk about Senna. This is how advanced this woman is. She made— What? This contour palette a while ago, before contour kits were even cool. And she made it with this ash tone. Look how ashy, bad— ashy color. And whenever I show people a contour kit like this, they're like, that's so dark! And in the meantime, they've got this orange swipe on their face. I'm like, who are you fooling? What drag show are you going to? How is that even cute? But it's their look, and I shouldn't talk shit. Look, I'm even gonna get crazy with this so you can see how cool. I don't like to do the typical just here swipe, but I start there and I bring it all the way into the ears so that I can keep the joke going. No one's gonna be like, uh, that contour's not going all the way to your ear. That's not really your bone structure. That's just contour. I don't wanna see the contour. I wanna see the effects of the contour. So get on my fave head up here. I've always had just a very high forehead. Sometimes I'm like, am I going bald? Do I have a receding hairline? But it's been like that since I was young, so the things we worry about, right? So I do like contour. I don't do it on everybody, like young people, or if I'm doing a minimalistic editorial look. The Phase 2 brush. I just love it. It's my favorite brush. So you see that, and immediately I just start popping it. And the way I'm popping it is in a— you can just see the way the light hits naturally on my face. So I want this to be the darkest point, and I want it to get lighter so this cheekbone is going to be coming out at you, and here it's coming in like I've got this amazing bone structure. But I want it to also push back the face here. Just a little bit. So, like if you have a really chubby face or a round face and you their goal is to chisel it. It's not just here; it's also bringing it up in kind of like a triangle way and pushing back this part of the face. So pop pop pop pop pop pop pop pop pop pop pop pop! And I hate when I'm describing this to people when I'm talking about the brush and I'm like, and then you just take it and you put it against your face and you every time I'm like, I know what it looks like, what I'm doing. So when you're blonde, when you're a natural blonde like me, you really have to be mindful of— I have this one friend, and God bless her, you know, she really does that Instagram-style makeup, and her whole root area is orange from all her bronzer. So I just be mindful of it. But now my roots that I dyed, I dyed them like this, they're coming out, so I don't have to be as careful. But still. Now I'm just buffing it up. Here I buff. But I'm lucky. I've got good skin, so I don't have to really worry about dry skin. And I use retinols and glycolics. So you can already see the benefits of my contour, like, from when we started. That shit looks tight! But you don't see the contour. You just see see the effects of the contour. And I bring it up pretty high. You can see that, how I blend it. And the way that I set it is I go in with another contour, my Lorac palette. The Lorac palette is the closest one to the ash tone that I like. Again, I want it to look like shadow, not like contour. So I'm going to go in with the Lorac palette. See, you can already see I'm like carving, I'm carving, I'm sculpting. And I'm putting the brunt of it in this spot right here. So I'm getting the mm-hmm-hmm-hmm-hmm-hmm-hmm. And the face moves in like an ebb and a flow, kind of like tides. So I've set that. I've set that contour, but it's mixing with the cream in such a way that it's creating such a nice barrier. Such a nice barrier. And I do everything everywhere, because if I have a certain color tone down here and I don't have it here— like, you could look at early Kardashian shows and they don't do their fucking forehead. And I'm like, do your fucking forehead! Also, so I have a long chin. Can you imagine me in traffic? I have a longer chin. I call it my Jay Leno chin. And it's cool. I'm into it. But for the sake of this tutorial and just showing you balance and shape and the rule of thirds, if we were to go by the rule of thirds, my chin just— it's a habitual line stepper. Steps right out. So I just kind of shorten it. Just a smidge. See how already that looks more chiseled? And I love a good square jawline. I've always loved Sigourney Weaver and Geena Davis and more masculine— I love that. Looking women. So that's how I'm gonna do it. You can go ahead and get up in here a little bit, just square off that. People walking by like, what the fuck?
