Contour powder

Contour powder is a matte pressed powder in the colour of a shadow: a brown with grey or taupe in it rather than red or gold. It is placed where light does not fall — the hollow beneath the cheekbone, under the jaw, at the temples and down the sides of the nose — so that those areas recede and the bones in front of them seem to come forward. It is a drawing technique as much as a product: shading, in the painter’s sense.

That is what separates it from bronzer, which it is often mistaken for and sometimes sold as. Bronzer is warm and adds the colour of a tan where the sun would land; contour is cool and adds depth where a shadow would fall. A warm powder in the hollow reads as colour, a cool one as shade. Contour must also be matte, because shimmer reflects light and a shadow does not. Single contour powders are rarer than bronzers; in Japan and Korea they are sold as shading powders, often in two or three tones to be blended together.

A real shadow on your face is a deeper, duller version of your own skin, so that is what to look for: one or two shades deeper than your complexion, neutral to cool, with no orange in it. On fair and light skin a soft taupe or grey-brown works; on olive skin a neutral taupe, since a warm brown turns muddy; on medium skin a neutral brown; on deep skin a deep, rich brown, because a grey powder on dark skin reads as ash rather than shadow. The quickest test is the shadow you already have: compare a swatch with the colour under your jaw in daylight, and choose the one that matches it.

Mattes vary in strength more than the pans suggest. A sheer powder is easier to build and harder to overdo, which makes it the better first contour; a strongly pigmented one gives a sharper result for photographs and evenings, and needs a lighter hand.

Use a small angled or tapered brush and very little powder. To find the hollow, feel for the underside of the cheekbone, or look for where it falls into shadow under an overhead light. Place the powder there, starting near the ear and stopping around the outer corner of the eye, and blend the top edge upward so that the colour sits under the bone rather than across the cheek. Shade under the jaw to sharpen it, at the temples to narrow the forehead and, with a small brush, in two soft lines down the sides of the nose.

Blend until there is no edge, then check in daylight: contour that looks right under a bathroom bulb can look like a stripe of dirt outdoors. Powder goes over foundation and setting powder, not onto a damp base. On dry skin, a cream contour underneath and a little powder on top lasts longer and looks softer than either alone.

The common mistakes are all versions of too much. Contour placed too low drags the face down; brought too far forward, towards the corner of the mouth, it reads as a stripe; a shade with any warmth or shimmer in it reads as bronzer; and a hard edge under the jaw looks like a line drawn round the face. Stop sooner than you think you should. A good shadow is noticed only when it is missing.

Shading a face is as old as painting, and it was practised on the stage long before the street. For everyday make-up the technique came out of the film studios. Panchromatic film, adopted after 1927, recorded the face in a wider range of greys than the stock it replaced, and make-up artists learned to use that range. Perc Westmore, chief make-up artist at Warner Brothers, built a system in the early 1930s that he called “Corrective Make-up”, which the historian James Bennett believes is the first recorded use of the term. Jack Dawn, at Universal, described the method in 1941: to hide a sagging chin, the make-up artist throws it, “photographically, in the shadow by applying a slightly darker shade of make-up to that area”.^[1]

After the Westmore brothers opened the House of Westmore in 1935 and began selling their own make-up, the ideas travelled into other firms’ make-up guides, and what had been done with rouge came to be done with foundation and powder.^[1] They travelled with an ideal: the oval face, the easiest to light and photograph, towards which every other shape was to be “corrected”. The film and television make-up author V. J-R. Kehoe argued in 1969 that the ideal belonged to black-and-white photography.^[1] It also carried a narrower standard. A Revlon trainer interviewed in 2015 described contouring used for years to sharpen features and narrow noses, under an industry ideal of an oval face and a dainty nose, one the article called a construct in which “beautiful” equated to “white”.^[2] Contour powder is at its most useful now for the opposite purpose: to bring out the face you have rather than redraw it towards someone else’s.^[1]