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You always dreamed of it, Mary Phillips made it. New to TikTok, Kendall Jenner and Hailey Bieber’s make-up artist devoted her first video to one of her clients’ beauty secrets: a perfectly sculpted complexion. At stake ? A surprising technique that should soon become viral… If this is not already the case.
How to get a perfect complexion while taking your foot off makeup? While naturalness has been at the top of beauty trends since the start of the pandemic, social media users are looking for tips on how to reduce the layers of makeup without neglecting their complexion. A challenge that public figures have managed to meet with flying colors thanks to the expert hands and techniques of their professional makeup artist(s). Fortunately, some have had the good idea to share their tips with as many people as possible. This is the case of Mary Phillipsmake-up artist of many celebrities, including Kendall Jenner, Hailey Bieber, Jennifer Lopez, or Kim Kardashian, who offers a tutorial to enjoy a perfect complexion and a sculpted face with a minimum of material.
Makeup tip: an inverted beauty routine for a perfect complexion
If you have adopted a classic make-up routine, you probably start with foundation, then add concealer, concealer, contour, and possibly blush. Verdict, you had it all wrong. This is what Mary Phillips reveals in her very first video published on the Chinese social network, and already seen nearly 2 million times in just three days. Before revealing her beauty secret, the professional make-up artist explains it: “it’s like putting the bones under the skin”. So far, nothing illogical. She continues, “contouring and highlighting being the bones, and the skin being the foundation.” As you will have understood, ordinary mortals did everything upside down until the publication of this video which puts back – Eureka! – things in their place.
This professional technique, which does not really have a name at the moment, but which could be baptized ‘reverse make-up’ – therefore results in a beauty treatment that begins not with the foundation, but by contouring and highlighting. It’s about sculpting the face before concealing the imperfections, and making everything homogeneous. All that remains is to apply the concealer, and the foundation for the final touch. The goal? Give the impression of not having too much makeup, and favor a more natural finish.
Is this a real novelty?
It’s not the first time that Mary Phillips has explained this professional technique, except that she had never done it before on TikTok. As we know, it doesn’t take much for the social network to get carried away, and transform a simple trick into a viral phenomenon. But this technique is above all reminiscent of another, that of underpainting, whose buzz on the same social network only dates back to last fall.
It was then a question of applying bronzer and blush on the contour of the face and the cheekbones before blurring them, then moving on to the concealer with – possibly – foundation as the final step. In other words, it’s exactly the same method, this time shared by professional makeup artist Katie Jane Hughes. Two buzzes a few months apart for an identical technique, that’s all the magic of TikTok. Only difference, you now know that by experimenting with it you will benefit from the same beauty treatment as the greatest supermodels on the planet.