Angled contour brush

An angled contour brush is a face brush of middle size, denser than a blush brush, whose head is cut on a slant so that one side is noticeably longer than the other. The slant is the point of it. Laid against the face, the long side runs along the hollow beneath the cheekbone and the short side sits above it, so the brush puts contour where a shadow would fall and keeps it from creeping up onto the bone. The density decides how much colour it carries: enough to lay down a band of shadow in one pass, not so much that the band cannot be blended.

Its neighbours look alike and do different work. An angled blush brush is fluffier and looser, made to diffuse colour over the apple and along the bone. A bronzer brush is larger still, for warmth across the broad planes of the face. A tapered sculpting brush comes to a point rather than an edge, and a nose contour brush is a small version of either, for the narrow places. The angled contour brush is the one for the cheekbone, the jaw and the temple.

Start with density. A firm, closely packed head, such as Morphe’s paddle-like M243 or Crown’s compact C532, stamps down a clear band of cream or liquid contour to be blended afterwards. A softer, fluffier one, such as Sigma’s F23, sweeps on a sheer shadow of powder that needs little blending at all, and is much harder to overdo; for a first contour brush, choose the softer kind. Then look at the cut. A sharp slant places a crisp shadow; a gentle one, like Laura Mercier’s slanted, rounded head, follows a rounder cheekbone and leaves a softer edge.

Choose the fibre by the formula. Synthetic fibre is not porous, so it suits cream, liquid and stick contour and washes clean. Hair grips and diffuses powder well, and some houses still use it: Anastasia Beverly Hills makes its A18 of natural fibres for powder, and Hakuhodo cuts its contour brush from blue squirrel and goat. Size should follow the face. On a narrow face or a small cheekbone, a large head spreads the shadow onto the cheek; a compact one keeps it in the hollow.

Find the hollow first: draw in your cheeks a little, or feel with a fingertip for the underside of the cheekbone. Tap the brush into the contour and knock off the excess, then lay the angle into the hollow with the long side towards the ear and the short side up towards the bone. Start near the ear and stop in line with the outer corner of the eye; a shadow carried further forward drags the face down.

Blend the upper edge in small back-and-forth strokes along the bone rather than across it, so the colour fades upward into the skin. Use what is left on the brush just under the jawbone, and at the temple near the hairline. With cream or liquid, press the product on with the flat of the angle first and blend at once, before it sets; with powder, sweep lightly and build a second layer only where the shadow needs to be deeper. Then step back and look at arm’s length, by a window: a contour that looks right close up often reads as a stripe from across a room.

Keep this brush for shadow. A brush that has carried contour muddies a highlighter, and one that has carried bronzer warms a shadow that should stay cool. Wash it after cream or liquid and at least weekly with powder, and dry it on its side so the angle keeps its line.

Before there was a contour brush there was the stump. Charles Townsend’s Make-up Book of 1899 recommended artists’ stumps to actors for drawing their lines, noting that they “cost but a trifle and save the waste made in sharpening the lining colors”.^[1] The stump came from the draughtsman’s box: a cigar-shaped roll of leather, paper or felt, often pointed at both ends, used in drawing to blend and smudge charcoal, chalk or pastel.^[2] It could draw a line and then soften it, which is exactly what shading a face asks for.

When contouring moved from the stage to the dressing table, the kits sold for it could come with brushes of their own. Max Factor’s Geminesse, an up-market line launched in 1966 and sold only through selected department stores, included highlighters and shadows to contour the face, an idea that, the historian James Bennett notes, the company had helped originate in the 1930s. Its Contour Supreme was “a trio of subtle highlights and shadows, with an outliner and fill-in brush”.^[3] Outline first, then fill: the stage method, sold in a compact.

The angled brush does both jobs with one head: its edge places the shadow and its body softens it. Hakuhodo, the brush maker of Kumano in Japan, tells buyers of its angled contour brush to “use light strokes as if you are removing excess product”.^[4] That is the whole technique in a sentence, and it is what the stump was for: to put a shadow exactly where it belongs, and then make its edge disappear.