How to fix your face
A fun little weekend project.
I’ve been thinking about you, a lot.
My “perfectionist” tendencies are getting in the way of my prolificity as a writer. The quotations are to indicate that anyone who has used the term towards me in a derogatory fashion is a moron. If less people feared perfection, we wouldn’t be trudging through the vast wasteland of digital and physical slop. Kraum requires perfection, and it’s clear that the improvisational, devil-may-care side of my brain has atrophied in the meantime. But I’ve been working on it.
Over the past two weeks, I wrote two 2,000-word letters which I didn’t send out. You wouldn’t have liked them anyway. Not enough pictures. That’s not true, I know there’s a powerful contingency of Vanity Project readers who positively crave a front row seat to beauty industry drama presented in hulking text blocks, but…I decided that this is not the best medium for the things I wanted to say.
**A moment of silence for Eyewitness Beauty podcast. Paused but not forgotten.**
With the spicier of the two newsletters loaded in the chamber, I texted a trusted advisor who has intimate knowledge of the spice in question for advice. She got back to me immediately—a phone call, she was serious. Though she agreed with my stance, broadcasting it would be too inflammatory. How does this benefit me or my company? Did I want to end up on Reddit? Did I want to give material to a pitiful wretch so she could mischaracterize and slander me in a sleazy, poorly written book, again? The letter remains in drafts.
My advisor also didn’t support an ad concept I was workshopping which would require me to shave off my eyebrows. I believe her words were, “don’t torpedo your company.”
Sigh. Such is the life of a #girlboss…muzzled!
Between the Beckhams and Peltzs, and the Livelys, Swifts, Queer Eyes, et al., I don’t think I could have competed for Best Drama last week anyway. Rage baiter I am not, even if I am enraged with everything happening. Even as I edit this, the news of Alex Pretti broke. I’ll stop myself here. I already ranted about Nazis and Greenland and AI and Trump and private healthcare and Palestine and consumerism in the other of the two unsent newsletters.
The main takeaway is that I am struggling as the sole proprietor of a beauty company in such an ugly time. I know what’s important, and to talk about anything else feels shameful.
So here I am, with nothing left to do but fix my face, so to speak: stop doing things like commenting on BOF’s Instagram posts that their editorial standards are in the gutter, and focus on the positives. Be the angelic creature your inbox needs in such darkness—radiate hope, progress, and beauty…the things I’m really good at.
It’s in this theme that I bring you my advanced, perfectionist method for face fixing: instructions for creating a completely custom, do-it-all makeup palette, smaller than a set of playing cards. Yes, it’s ideal for travel and on-the-go touch-ups, but also: having a palette of several cream formulas at hand will turn you into a pro at color matching, concealing, and sculpting all parts of your face.
This exercise is especially useful for those of us who have several shades of concealer which we find ourselves rotating through like a game of roulette: a long walk in the sun, and the shade that’s matched all season now highlights my zits in a greyish white. As a fair olive, I’ll need a deeper orange-tinged shade for my forehead, but a much lighter greenish shade for my neck.
Advanced makeup application is not about making the entire face and neck a single shade using high-coverage products; it involves precision color-correcting and color matching, and using sheer products on larger areas to create cohesion. This is why people on reality TV look flat and cakey, while A-list celebrities who work with the Nina Parks of the world look like they sleep inside of an artificial womb.
YOU WILL NEED:
-one AKC 1.0 palette—essential, I am not aware of any other company which makes a palette like this. Ditto for the pans.
-one AKC spatula—I know that Van, AKC’s founder, developed this to be springy and sharp. It really is the best for carving out what you need to fill the tiny pans, and for mixing cream formulas. You can find similar at the pro art supply (not Michael’s or Hobby Lobby), but probably nothing as small.
-one mixing palette—I used AKC’s acrylic palette, but prefer mixing things on a steel palette because I am not gentle and tend to scratch the surface. You can pick up a palette at the art supply, or use anything with a clean, hard, non-porous surface with a 90 degree edge for scraping your spatula clean.
-a heating contraption—Optional, this is mainly for aesthetic purposes to create a smooth surface on the cream formulas which are solid at room temp. I created a double-boiler situation by putting a flat baking sheet over a pot of simmering water. I would avoid direct heat, and not heat any shimmer formulas or liquids you want to include in your compact. Heating formulas can “break” them, and cause the shimmers and pigments to separate so that they aren’t evenly dispersed.
-tweezers, or small metal tongs
-your favorite viscous concealers, foundations, contour, highlighter, and blush—Using “liquid” formulas, which are not solid at room temperature, can be done, but is somewhat of a risk because when exposed to air, they can dry down to a darker shade. Or, there’s the risk of them smearing around your compact when in transit if they don’t ever dry down to a solid state.
-color correcting ingredients—I tend to best match neutral-to-warm shades off the shelf, but sometimes need to cool them down by adding blue, and lighten them a bit with white pigment. I suggest matte powder eyeshadow for mixing into cream formulas. Check that they have NO shimmer, even shades listed as matte sometimes have a bit of shimmer.
-Kraum Micro Taper Brush—This is my most used brush; it is THE perfect spot concealing brush. And no, there are truly no other brushes like it, so I have no alternatives to offer. Though if you want to get even more precise, my friend and makeup artist Allie Smith always used a tiny pointed brush like the Micro Saber Brush to intricately, pin-point spot conceal on Glossier campaign shoots.
To assemble, use your spatula to carve out sections of your solid formulas to fill your pans. I like to use 16 small pans which I’ve filled with skin-tone shades, color correcting shades, and a contour, a bronzer, and two shimmery highlighters. I like to include two empty medium pans to mix as I apply.
This is custom to you, so exercise free will. If you use a lot of bronzer, highlighter, or any single shade of foundation or concealer, you can of course fill medium pans with these shades instead, especially if you need more surface area to apply with your finger instead of the brush.
I created the green-blue color correcting shade to have as its own pan by mixing a white-yellow cream high coverage foundation with shavings from a matte blue eyeshadow. You can use the spatula and mixing palette to customize any shade before adding to a pan. I think I’ll mix a red and mauve lipstick to swap in as a blush shade next.
To level-off the product in each pan, you can smush and scrape with the spatula until it’s flat enough, but it’s much tidier to use the heat, as I mentioned above.
That’s all I got today. More soon.
-Annie
I know I will never do this but my God I loved reading about it
The amount I would be willing to pay for a consultation/custom palette…