It was back in middle school when I learned how important personalization was for a makeup look.
I was 13 and about to go to my first ever school dance where boys and girls would be dancing, so the stakes were high! My friend group all got ready at Jacqueline’s house beforehand, and she did our makeup. The only problem was that Jacqueline’s makeup was three shades darker than mine, and the eyeliner look that enlarged her eyes somehow made mine look small and beady.
I spent most of the night at the dance running back and forth from the dance floor to the mirror in the bathroom and puzzling over why I looked so different. It wasn’t until I got older that I realized how important it is to apply makeup and use makeup products that work for your face personally.
Why we need personalization?
There are two main personalization characteristics to keep in mind when doing your makeup. The first one is skin tone, and the second is facial features.
Even underneath these two features, there’s a lot to consider. When it comes to skin tone, it’s important to know what shade of makeup matches your skin (I’ve fallen victim before to leaving the house with my face looking one color and my neck looking a different one), but it’s also important to know what tone your skin is.
Knowing your shade will help you determine what foundation and concealer to wear, but knowing your tone will help you match lipstick colors to your skin and can even help you in a larger sense with what color clothing looks most flattering on you as well.
Up next to consider are your facial features. After I learned about my personal facial features, it completely changed the way I looked at makeup. I no longer flipped through magazines and assumed all makeup looks could work for me - but rather, I looked at the art of the makeup done on certain faces.
Knowing your facial features can be an incredible benefit, and this applies to more than just your face shape. Knowing the features of all parts of your face will also help you achieve the best makeup look. For example, knowing your eye shape can help you apply the best eye makeup looks. An eyeshadow look that works for hooded eyes will come across looking much differently on almond-shaped eyes.
It might seem like an overwhelming task to learn about all of these features before even getting started on your makeup, but I promise that it’s worth the time to know about your skin tone, shade, facial shape, and facial features. Something that helps me learn about this without having to put too much time into it is the Forever Beauty app.
Forever Beauty is a free app that has personalized tutorials based on your facial preferences and features - for all skin types. When you first log onto the app, you find your best facial preferences by answering a few short questions. Then you’ll have all of your facial features (eye shape, brow shape, face shape, lip shape, and skin tone) in one place on the app. This saves me a lot of time from having to manually google each individual feature, head over to the mirror, puzzle over my shape, and then repeat that process for all of my facial features.
Once you have your personalized preferences set, you’re able to use tutorials that are customized for you specifically. The tutorials are divided into two sections - Makeup and Face Yoga.
The makeup tutorials cover most of the everyday makeup routines, but all in a personalized manner and taking your specific skin tone into consideration. The face yoga tutorials are also personalized, and you can pick and choose which tutorial you want to do based on how much daily time you have free.
The tutorials are fantastic for anyone of any level of makeup expertise. Whether, For example, if your skin tone is light and your eye shape is hooded, you’ll have personalized tutorials for fair skin and hooded eye shape. If your skin tone is medium and your brow shape is thin, or if your skin tone is dark and your face shape is a heart - all of these options are possible to pick and choose from when you use the tutorials.
Using Forever Beauty is such an easy solution for me because it learns what my personal makeup needs are and provides me with the exact solution for them - both for makeup and also face yoga.
Also, if I ever have any questions about my makeup look or features, I can get expert feedback through the app by recording a video and sending it to one of the forever beauty experts. They review the video and point out what was done correctly or incorrectly, and provide annotations.
So if you’re looking for a free app (completely free, no in-app payments either), I highly suggest downloading Forever Beauty. It’s a great app for anyone of any age to learn the basics of makeup and their face shape and play around with the correct looks for them personally. I also love the face yoga aspect for the days when I don’t wear makeup (which happens a lot with the new Work From Home going on across the world).
Forever Beauty is also working on new improvements to update the app even further. They’re working on making the app AI-powered, which means that your face will be scanned when opening the app, and your face shape, skin tone, undertone, and other facial features can automatically be recorded and identified! Then, based off of your scan, you’ll have a list of personalized tutorials to view that corresponds to your exact face. Forever Beauty will be able to recognize problem areas of your face and provide solutions (both makeup and face yoga) for specific areas that you want to improve. The app is also working on updates for the future that will recommend specific products for you based on your personal face. This is something I’m looking forward to the most - I’ve always told my girlfriends over happy hour that I would gladly buy whichever product helped me the most, I just needed to know which one was right for me because I’ve wasted so much money in the past buying products that weren’t personally right for my face.
This app has been a huge help for me in identifying the best ways to apply makeup for my face, and I can’t help but wish that I had used Forever Beauty before my school dance when I was 13!
