Contouring is out! A new trend is in!

Makeup Artist credit: Alex Box for Issey.

"Wait! What?! Did I read that correctly?"

This might be your reaction right now. Yes, you read the title of my blog correctly and there's nothing wrong with your eyesight. If by the end of this year someone asks me to review what were the best things that happened in 2015, I would gladly tell them about how the contouring trend was replaced with the 'strobing' trend.

What is that you ask?

Well let me first clarify, and simultaneously ease your worries, that this new trend called 'strobing' is nothing new at all; it is just the good old highlighting that most of us have already been doing, but I assume that the beauty industry is hooked on giving it a fancy name because of which it has been highlighted recently (no pun intended).

Let me review contouring and state that it is done to give a chiseled look to the face and it received a phenomenal amount of attention because people saw some prominent Hollywood beauties carrying that look like it was nobody else's business, and while i'm not sure about the origins of when the Instagram artists started to do that but one also got to see the contouring trend being ubiquitous on there too. Needless to say, all the contouring looks did give a glamorous appeal to the face and eventually makeup artists and girls in Pakistan also got hooked to it. So, contouring has been in the limelight for quite a while and for good reasons, but now the international beauty community is apparently saying that it should take a side.



Turns out, contouring is not for everyone because most girls who are not trained or naturally good at applying makeup, find it difficult to do and quite frankly, they despise contouring. This is where the new, more natural and fairly easy cousin of contouring called strobing is coming in and catching all the attention; the only thing is, that it has been there forever but just got a revamped name.

Like I stated above, strobing is basically highlighting and it is an easy way to bring out attention to the high points of your face. The simple steps are that you put a highlighter on the high points of your face which are your cheek bones, bridge of the nose, forehead, temples and some on the chin to give you an illuminated look. It really is the final step I do in my work as a face painter to give a natural looking radiant touch to a look.

But behold! Strobing or highlighting can only look natural if you know how to control using too much highlighters, so I would say that a basic understanding of makeup is necessary to be able to pull of this look the best way i.e. to give natural looking radiance.

Also, it might look a little less maintenance but there are important things to keep in mind:

• it helps if you already have a near perfect skin but I've done this on people with a problem skin but after using tons of medium coverage foundation. 
• some highlighters while being really good at their jobs are a lot less pigmented and they might not work on a heavy duty foundation as opposed to a lighter coverage foundation. 
• highlighting is half the part of contouring, but the one this strobing trend talks about is highlighting that is done naturally and to put a spotlight on the areas of the face that naturally catch light and is perfect for a dewy look.
• also, I have nothing against contouring but I think one doesn't always need to blindly follow trends to fit in.