Highlighting and contouring is a great way to accentuate your natural features while giving you a flawless look. Highlighting uses makeup 2 shades lighter than your face shade, while contouring uses 2 shades darker than your face shade. The goal of this process is to highlight the parts of your face that are flattering, while contouring the parts of your face that you want to hide, conceal, or appear differently. For example, I heavily contour under my cheek bones to make face appear more slim.
Many makeup artists, tutorials, and articles on the highlight and contour process will recommend expensive name brand products- many of which are not practical in price. For highlight and contour products alone you could spend anywhere from $50-$150 trying to match product recommendations or to get that celebrity look. From personal experience, I will be the first to tell you that you do not need to break the bank in order to achieve the Kardashian contour.
Drug stores like CVS and Wallgreens offer great products like Cover Girl, Maybelline New York, and L’Oreal Paris. For a fraction of the cost, you can purchase products from these retailers that are not only frugal, but do the same job as the big name products sold at MAC and Sephora. In the past I have used products that were expensive, including brands like Bobbi Brown and Clinique. What I have learned is that if you do a little research, you can product match these name brand products to those at the drug store.
When I highlight and contour my own face, I use 4 different products, all from the drug store. All together these products cost me around $40. For liquid I use Maybelline New York Age Rewind for both the highlight and contour. For powder I use L’Oreal True Match for the contour and Infallible Pro Matte for the highlight. I use a liquid highlight and contour, and after blending, I put a powder highlight and contour over to “cook” my makeup. Check out my article Why You Should “Cook” Your Makeup to learn more about this process.