Why Your Eyeshadow Creases by Noon, and the Five Minute Look That Holds

You do your eyes in the morning and they look clean. By lunch the color has slid into the crease, there is a line cutting across your lid that was not there when you left the house, and any shimmer you brushed on has gathered in every bit of texture. If that is your day, every day, the problem is not that you are doing it wrong. Part of it is technique, and part of it is what eyeshadow does on lid skin that has changed.

What is actually happening on your lid

Your eyelids have the thinnest skin on your body. As that skin matures it moves more, it holds oil differently, and it gives color somewhere to travel. Cream shadows and heavy shimmer have the most to give, so they migrate, and they settle into the one place you did not want them, the crease. This is not a flaw in how you apply it. It is the nature of a cream sitting on warm, mobile, oil-touched skin all day.

This is the reason I make our eyeshadows as powder and not cream. I have done makeup on mature skin for over twenty years, and cream color has never held on a lid the way it holds on younger skin. Powder, set onto a prepped lid, has nothing to slide into. Once the lid is prepped, the rest is technique, and that part is simple.

The five minute look, start to finish

1. Set the lid first. One light press of Pressed Powder across the bare lid. This is the step most people skip, and it is the one that decides whether the look lasts. The powder absorbs the oil that pulls color into the crease and gives the shadow something to grip.
2. Start soft. Sweep a soft to medium shade onto the crease only, using the body of the brush rather than the tip. Blend it up toward the higher edge of the crease and outward. Build the pigment slowly to the depth you want. Slow layering keeps you in control and keeps the color even.
3. Add depth. With a round brush, press a deeper shade in a thin line into the deepest part of the crease, then blend. This is what gives the eye its definition. Keep it powder. Powder does not travel the way a cream does.
4. Light under the brow. With a medium eyeshadow brush, place a light shade just under the brow bone. This softens the crease line and opens the eye.
5. Eyeliner. Use that same deeper shade as a soft liner with a mini brush. Keep it a thin line along the upper lashes and pull it slightly outward at the end.
6. The eye lift. With a medium eyeshadow brush, take a shade slightly lighter than your light shade to the outer corner of the eye and blend it out and up. This is the part that lifts the eye.
7. Finish. Tightline close to the lashes, one coat of mascara, and you are done.

Five minutes. No crease at noon.

Build only the shades you reach for

You can build your own palette with any shades you actually use, so you are not paying for ten you will never open. The colors you keep reaching for become your palette, and nothing goes to waste in the drawer.

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Less pressure, more presence. Avital | Puzzle Makeup