By makeupbymaryphillips / TikTok
A newcomer to TikTok, Kendall Jenner and Hailey Bieber's makeup artist, Mary Phillips, dedicated her first video to one of her clients' ultimate beauty secrets: how to achieve a perfectly contoured and highlighted base. The key to success lies in a surprising technique that's sure to go viral... if it hasn't already.
A newcomer to TikTok, Kendall Jenner and Hailey Bieber's makeup artist, Mary Phillips, dedicated her first video to one of her clients' ultimate beauty secrets: how to achieve a perfectly contoured and highlighted base. The key to success lies in a surprising technique that's sure to go viral... if it hasn't already.
How do you achieve a flawless base while going easy on makeup? Since the beginning of the pandemic, beauty has taken a more natural turn, with social network users looking for ways to reduce layers of makeup without neglecting their complexion. A challenge that celebrities have managed to meet with flying colors thanks to the expert hands and techniques of their professional makeup artist(s). Now, some of them have had the very good idea of sharing their tips and tricks with the world. This is the case of Mary Phillips, a makeup artist to many celebrities, including Kendall Jenner, Hailey Bieber, Jennifer Lopez and Kim Kardashian, who has shared a tutorial for achieving a flawless complexion and a perfectly contoured and highlighted base with minimal product.
Doing it backwards
If you follow a classic makeup routine, you probably start by applying foundation, then add concealer, contouring products and then maybe blush. But it turns out that you've got it all wrong, according to Mary Phillips and her very first video posted on the Chinese social network -- already seen almost two million times in just three days. Before revealing her beauty secret, the professional makeup artist explains: "it's like laying down the bones under the skin." So far, so logical. She continues: "the contour and the highlight being the bones, and the skin being the foundation." So, it seems, we've been doing everything backwards. But thankfully this video has come along to put things right. Phew!
This professional technique -- which doesn't really have a name at the moment, but which could be called something like 'reverse makeup' -- is effectively a beauty routine that begins not with foundation, but with contouring and highlighter. It's all about sculpting the face before concealing imperfections, and then evening everything out to bring the look together. All that's left is to apply concealer and foundation for the final touch. The goal is to give the impression that you're not wearing too much makeup, and to favor a more natural finish.
Is it really all that new?
This is not the first time that Mary Phillips has explained this professional technique, except that she had never before done so on TikTok. As we know, it doesn't take much for the social network to get carried away, turning a simple trick into a viral sensation. But this technique is reminiscent of another, called underpainting, which was all the rage on the same social network in the fall of last year.
That trend involved applying bronzer and blush to the facial contour and cheekbones before blending, then moving on to concealer then foundation as the final step. In other words, it's almost exactly the same method, only this time shared by the professional makeup artist Katie Jane Hughes. The same technique going viral in the space of just a few months, that's the magic of TikTok. The only difference is that you now know that following this technique should get you the same flawless base as some of the world's most famous models.
