Green Eyes

When I first started out wearing make up I made a little bit of a rookie error and went through a phase (I say phase, this probably lasted several years) of matching my eyeshadow to my outfit. Blue dress? Blue eyeshadow. Purple top? Purple eyeshadow. Yellow jumper? Yellow eyeshadow. So on and so forth. As I became more comfortable with make up this evolved from purely being one shadow smudges across the lid to multiple shadows blended out in elaborate smokey eyes - three different shades of turquoise, one across the lid, one in the crease, one under the eye. And, due to my OCD, if I was wearing an outfit with more than one colour then you can bet your bottom dollar I'd have all the colours of the outfit involved on my eyes somehow. I also wasn't a fan of blending the edges and liked a nice harsh racoon look in whatever colour matched the outfit going on. *Shudder*

Anyway, I one day realised this probably wasn't the best look and went really far in the other way, I began to only apply things that were taupe or brown to my eyes and it was probably the best part of a year before I even went as far as applying a black smokey eye again. What this means is that I'd built myself up quite the collection of coloured eyeshadows and when I ordered my blogger-requisite Muji storage last year I did the final purge and binned most of the ones that were still lingering. But not all.

I have always been told green shades have really suited me as my eyes have green in them which sometimes comes out to play (they can range from gold to amber to brown to green in the space of a few hours) and something made me hold on to a few of these green eyeshadows.

You can see my first attempt at picking these back up in last August's London video here. Now, in all fairness I don't think I had the camera at the best angle and I was filming with my back to the light so I think the video is making it all look a little bit worse than it actually is, but watching it back was enough to make me put the eyeshadows safely away again.

It wasn't until recently when I was looking at photos of Olivia Palermo's wedding that I noticed just how heavy Olivia's eye make up was in comparison to her usual (I like to spend a lot of my spare time looking at pictures of Ms Palermo, or Mrs Huebl!) - she has a really dark brown across her whole lid but the eye doesn't look OTT or dramatic.

It got me thinking - could I use this theory to apply a coloured eyeshadow without looking like a 4 year old had gone rampant with the colouring in pens across my face? I think the above result speaks for itself.

I actually really, really like it.

By restricting the colour just to the lids the colour itself becomes much less of a statement and less overpowering to the whole make up look, although this eyeshadow is bright green the overall look is a really pretty, everyday make up look that I'd be happy to wear to run into the library at uni or head to the shops in - no matter what colour I was wearing!

To achieve it I used an Estee Lauder duo which is no longer - washing the basic light shadow all over my eyes and over the inner corners, you just want any old Mac Brûlée-esque shade, just to create a base and to be honest you could probably skip the step altogether if you fancied. I then went in with the green from the duo, which is Ivy Envy and still available to buy as an individual shadow, and took that all over the lid on a Prestige eye shadow brush - which is again no longer available but any blending brush will do. (I'm really showing just how long I've been into make up for here, and just how long it takes me to use products up or admit that it's time to just bin them because they're clearly way past their use-by date!)

Using the same brush I then picked up some of the brighter green shade by Urban Decay, Krush, and blended some of that just in a line in the centre of my eye lid so it would catch the light when I closed my eyes without making it into a dramatic 12 tones smokey eye. I then lined with a really thin line of Stila's Smudge Stick Eyeliner in the shade Moray (the green one!) just to add a tiny bit of definition. I didn't want to stray into making anything about the look besides the colour itself dramatic though, so it was a very very thin line. My top tip for a thin line of eyeliner is to draw it almost along your eyelashes rather than your eyelid - if you press more of the weight of the product on your lashes it means you get the thinest line on the lid and once you apply mascara any colour that might be on your lashes disappears. in terms of mascara I opted for the Clinique High Impact Extreme Volume Mascara which is starting to dry up and will need replaced soon but is still performing to the last - very impressed with it! As for my eyebrows, I filled them in with the Rimmel Eye Pencil in 002 Hazel and brush through with a MAC 204.

I had powdered with my Make Up Forever HD Powder (nice powder to have if you're into filming things but totally not necessary if you're not doing stuff on camera as it doesn't work well with flash photography so you'd only really get the benefits of it in day-time photos, depends how flawless you want those holiday snaps to be!) before applying the make up so was able to brush most of the fall down off anyway, but my top concealer for topping up after powder is the Estee Lauder Disappearing Smoothing Creme Concealer. It's not my HG concealer but it is the best for blending in and topping up without every going cakey and it works really well for topping up on a night out after you've applied powder as it blends in so seamlessly.

So there you have it - how I applied a coloured eyeshadow and came out of it unscathed! Going to experiment with different colours and see how it comes out - I will master you blue eyeshadow, I will!