How to do makeup well (guide for transgirls)

Crossdressing as a part of or type of selfbondage.
Post Reply
User avatar
Imaginary_Girl
**
Posts: 86
Joined: 21 Mar 2016, 20:58
Location: South Central United States

How to do makeup well (guide for transgirls)

Post by Imaginary_Girl »

(By the way I know this isn't the first one of these but I'm bored and I do think I do this well so I wanted to share it!)

I thought I might take a crack at writing something like this since I do makeup really well and it's an important area that can seem ridiculously overwhelming at first. I know it was many years ago when I first decided to learn to do it well. I spent probably 20 hours watching tutorials on the net back then and that gave me the basic knowledge. The rest just kind of comes from practice. There is an absolutely ridiculous level of knowledge you can get in to if you want, but I aim for this to be just an easy and accessible beginners level tutorial. This is directed at anyone who has no experience at all in doing makeup. It's generally gonna be useful for people who are physically guys and are trying to make themselves look like girls. The first thing we will do is cover some very basic stuff on what your goals should be in this whole process. I will be writing this guide in section with each post being a different section just for readability and sanity. When I'm done I will make an index(it may take me a few days to write everything! There is a lot to cover even for basics.) We will cover things in the order I think it's best to do them in.

The first thing that is important to note is that the quality of the makeup you buy will reflect quite a bit in the final look you get. It's okay to buy some cheap dollar store level stuff for practice, but unless you are really good with it it will not turn out nearly as well as something better. That's also not to say though you have to go out and buy the most expensive makeup on the market either. I wouldn't recommend over or under spending. Just kinda aim for the middle ground. Also some areas you can go cheaper than others. For instance you can generally go pretty cheap on eyeliner and be fine, but going cheap on foundation will leave you with a cakey mess of a face!

I am of the opinion that well done makeup shouldn't look like you are wearing any at all(except for maybe your eyes, depending). However as guys/transgirls/whatever it's a little more complicated than that. There are things about our faces that give away our physical gender and part of the goal here is to hide that. The first thing you need to do is identify how masculine or not your face is. There are generally three main things that dictate that - eyebrows/jawline/fat distribution(which controls the overall shape). Girls faces are rounder with generally softer jawlines and the overall structure of the face is softened by the way the fat under the skin is distributed. And girl's eyebrows generally sit higher on the browbone and arch more. Below are two images which I have labeled to highlight the main differences between male and female faces:

Female face: http://i.imgur.com/r7IJ7GU.jpg
Male face: http://i.imgur.com/95wWppm.jpg

Aside from making you look cute/pretty in general, your overall goal with makeup should be to change as many of your male features in to neutral features(or if you can, female features) as possible. The main things I do are make my eyes look bigger, arch my eyebrows, keep my lips soft and well cared for, and hide the shape of my jaw with my hair. I'm lucky in that my face isn't terribly masculine. It leans masculine but not by a lot. If we took a 0 - 10 scale where 0 is 100% feminine, 10 is 100% masculine and 5 is completely androgynous my face is probably a 6.5. After doing my entire transformation process it's probably a 3.5.

Unfortunately you can't control what your base face looks like. Just being trans doesn't mean you automatically look feminine - you could be incredibly masculine looking and still be trans. So you very much have to work with what you've got. The best advice I can probably give you is this - do your eyes VERY WELL. If your eyes are done well then that's where the attention will mostly be and it will draw attention away from the not-so-feminine stuff you can't control!

Another thing to think about is how committed to the transformation process are you? I don't mean overall, but rather at this point in time. For instance, when I want to really look cute and girly I shave my sideburns off and trim my eyebrows in to an arch. Obviously that takes time to grow back and until it does you will be looking that way regardless of which gender you are trying to present. Makeup washes off but hair takes time to grow back! Also I always keep my hair long. It's actually shorter than usual right now because the stylist did not listen well. But usually my hair is at least chin length and often longer. I have very healthy looking super dark brown curly hair and it looks very good both as a guy and as a girl. If you are serious about looking like a girl then you might consider keeping your hair longer. It doesn't have to be super long but e.g. a 1/4 inch fade is not gonna do anything to help you look like a girl!

Next is something I cannot stress enough - buy good quality brushes for applying the makeup! Do NOT use the crappy little ones that come with what you buy. They absolutely suck and are basically useless. This is the #1 most important tip I learned from watching videos about makeup many years ago. At the very least you want a fat poofy face powder brush for face powder and blending(blending is key!), a slightly less fat but still poofy blush brush for blush, and a thin soft brush for eyeshadow. You also will want an eyelash curler if you wanna do really well. They are cheap and I will tell you a secret about how to use them well when we get to mascara later! Having these tools is VERY important. It makes life a lot easier and you will do a much better job! They don't have to be expensive - even $2-3 brushes are leagues better than the crappy included ones.

I'll end this introduction part with shaving and moisturizing. You have to shave very well and very closely if you wanna do this job right. It's hard to cover up even a 5 o'clock shadow and to do so you will look like you are obviously wearing too much foundation. That is definitely not the ideal situation! You need to shave about 30 minutes before you start doing makeup and then put on a good facial moisturizer. You really should put on a moisturizer every day if you are serious about this. You want something light and not greasy and not drying. It's good for your face regardless of the gender you want to present. The reason you wanna do both these things about 30 minutes before is you wanna give the moisturizer time to absorb before you start putting makeup over it.

With these basic ideas out of the way it's time to jump head first in to what this is really all about - makeup. First up in the next post we will cover foundation!
User avatar
Imaginary_Girl
**
Posts: 86
Joined: 21 Mar 2016, 20:58
Location: South Central United States

Re: How to do makeup well (guide for transgirls)

Post by Imaginary_Girl »

So foundation. Foundation is... the foundation. Of your face. Of your transformation. You wanna make sure you do it especially well because it literally is at the very core of what your face will look like. The purpose of foundation is twofold - it softly blends the skin on your face into an overall uniform tone, and it generally gives the makeup that comes after something to "stick" to. There are two main types of foundation - liquid and powder. Unfortunately I only know how to do liquid foundation. I am not gonna try to do guesswork and explain something I don't know! If someone else knows how to do powder foundation then please post about it and I will incorporate that in to here!

The first thing is to make sure you choose the correct shade. Grabbing just any random foundation will likely not work well. There is a reason they come in many different shades! You want to get the closest shade to your own natural skin tone that you can get. It's pretty simple really. Just compare the shade of what you can see in the bottle to your face and get whatever is the closest to that. It doesn't have to be exact. Close is good enough here. You also want to make sure you get something that is lightweight. Heavy, cheap foundation leads to cake face and cake face is not appealing or girly or cute or anything you want! The foundation I buy generally costs around $10 per bottle and a bottle lasts quite a long time. You may have to experiment with different ones to find something you like and that works well for you. If you are somewhere you can test product then you can test it by getting a small dab on your finger and blending it in to the back of your hand. Then you can tell how heavy/light it is and how well it will blend with your skin tone!

Now your overall goal with foundation is to lightly even out your complexion and give subsequent makeup something to stick to. As an addition for transgirls you want to hide any remnant of facial hair you couldn't get rid of by shaving. If you are unfortunate in that area like me you may have to add in some concealer for that purpose as well(that's next, by the way). You are absolutely NOT trying to cover up every little unique imperfection or freckle or whatever on your face. You aren't icing a cake! Those things give your face character as well. If your face just becomes one smooth solid tone then it will look very unnatural. You wind up with what I call "photoshop face" - your face looks like someone took the blend tool in photoshop to it. Not good! Also if you can look in to the mirror and the first thing you think is "Wow! I'm wearing foundation!" then you've overdone it! It's okay to be able to tell a little bit, especially in the area where your facial hair would be(can't be helped sometime). But if that is literally the first thing you notice then yeah, it's too much.

Now on to how to actually put the stuff on your face. Some people like to use a proper foundation brush or sponge, I always use my bare fingers so that's what I'm going to describe. The idea is basically the same either way. What you wanna do is get a little dab on your finger by opening the bottle, covering the opening with your finger and then flipping the bottle over so a little comes out on your finger. Then you take that dab and you dot it on your face like I've shown in the image below. Each dot is just a very small amount. Don't put too much! I'm gonna keep saying that so you remember :D The yellow circles are the areas I ALWAYS put a dot. The blue ones are optional ones that I may or may not put a dot depending on how much coverage I need.

Image

Once you've got your face dotted you want to blend everything in very very well. Again as I said the goal is to just add a softness and uniformity to your complexion and facial tone. You want very even coverage all over your face. No area should be any heavier than any other area. If an area seems to have too little coverage then you can add a little bit more. If you have too much in one area then just blend blend blend until you've got it evened out. If you have WAY too much then you may need to wash your face and retry.

One thing to consider as a transgirl is you may wanna put some on your neck right under your face. Blend it uniformly in the direction up towards your face, but towards your body blend it out so that the transition from foundation to no foundation is not noticeable. I.e. you want a gradient so that the further from your face it gets the less foundation there is. This is useful because if you are like me you probably needed a little bit more than optimal to smooth our your facial hair region. If you don't blend it out in to your neck the transition is abrupt and makes it very obvious you are wearing makeup. That is never good.

Whether you do or don't do what I described in the last paragraph what you do need to do is blend the edges of where foundation is out into where foundation is not. That is to say there should be no abrupt transition anywhere. You always want to blend things smoothly out. There should not be a line where you can see that "Here there is foundation and here there is not." So you go around your entire face at the edges and make it smoothly transition back in to your own skin.

There is some level of intuition involved in this that can only be developed through practice. You should not expect to go from manface to cutegirlface the very first time you try. If you do, I envy you! Anyway that's pretty much it for the basics of foundation. Next up is concealer! Very very important stuff!

(By the way if you are wondering about setting the foundation I do that later because I like to blend some things at the same time!)
Last edited by Imaginary_Girl on 08 May 2016, 16:21, edited 1 time in total.
User avatar
teather
**
Posts: 127
Joined: 31 Jan 2009, 18:15
Location: Scotland

Re: How to do makeup well (guide for transgirls)

Post by teather »

If you don't want to trim or pluck your eyebrows you can cover or shape them them with pritt stick - washable kids glue stick - then pencil them where you want them.
User avatar
Imaginary_Girl
**
Posts: 86
Joined: 21 Mar 2016, 20:58
Location: South Central United States

Re: How to do makeup well (guide for transgirls)

Post by Imaginary_Girl »

That's an interesting idea. I'm curious how you do that?

My own eyebrows sit in a fairly neutral position and by trimming them from below in to an arch they turn out pretty well. Personally I don't like the penciled in look but it could definitely be useful for those that aren't comfortable changing their face semi-permanently by trimming/plucking/waxing/whatever their eyebrows. So yeah I'm curious how you do this.
User avatar
Imaginary_Girl
**
Posts: 86
Joined: 21 Mar 2016, 20:58
Location: South Central United States

Re: How to do makeup well (guide for transgirls)

Post by Imaginary_Girl »

It's often said that concealer is a girl's best friend. Well it's a transgirl's best friend too. Concealer is what you will use to hide imperfections on your face. Moles/freckles/facial hair remnant/scars/red spots/under eye circles etc. However it's VERY easy to overdo it. Good concealer works well and you may be tempted to just go all around your face hiding every little dot and spot that you can find. Don't! Imperfections give your face character. It's what makes your face your face. You want to find a balance between hiding the things you really need hidden and showing the things that make your face unique. There are also some times you might want to just partially hide something. For instance I've got a single conspicuous freckle just barely to the right of my nose. I like to lighten it with concealer but not completely cover it as that's part of what makes my face my face. I wanna look like a girl but I still wanna look like me! Again like with foundation there are liquid and solid types and I only know about the liquid type!

That means the first thing to do is identify what you want to cover and what you don't. The basic idea is simple - if something draws a lot of attention on it's own you should probably cover it. The main thing on your face that should be drawing attention is your eyes! Anything that will pull someone's attention away from that all by itself needs to get hidden. Other stuff can get lightened or left alone depending on your preference. In the previous step we did foundation to even out the overall tone of your skin. Concealer is not for that, so don't try to use it for that!

Personally I like to have two different tones of concealer. I like to have one that matches my facial skin tone very closely, and one that is a tad bit lighter. Which one I will use in a given place very much depends on what I'm trying to do. For hiding something I generally use the one that matches my skin tone. However, for under eye circles I like to use the lighter one. The lighter one is also useful for lightening but not hiding things(e.g. conspicuous freckle). Just like with foundation you can test how well it works for you by using the back of your hand. Concealer is heavier than foundation but it should not be super heavy and it should not be oily!

Generally concealer comes with it's own brush and it's not completely useless like I said most are. I like to use a combination of said brush and my own fingers when working with it. The very first time you use it you are gonna need to figure out how much you need for any given thing you want to hide. The #1 tip I can give you here is blending is key! Blending is very important in the whole makeup process really.

For blemishes(mole/freckle/red spot/etc) - Take your concealer brush and apply a small bit to the area you want to work on. Then use your finger or the brush(whichever works best for you) to blend the concealer back in to your skin. A useful thing you can do here is just lightly tap the area with your finger over and over. If you have a light concealer like mine that will work very well to push it down in to the skin and cover the blemish. Once you have it blended you will see the blemish or whatever lighten or maybe even disappear! Repeat this process in the same place until you've covered what you want to cover but make sure you cannot see the concealer itself. It's a balancing act between covering and blending. It's actually not that hard though because all you've gotta do is add little tiny bits at a time until you get the effect you are going for. After a few times of doing this you will know how much any given thing takes to cover and the process will go a lot faster. The tapping method is more useful for things that need a moderate/heavy amount of coverage as you avoid pushing the concealer out in to areas it's not needed. For lighter coverage a standard smoothing blending motion will work better.

For under eye circles - In this case the approach is very slightly different since we are not hiding but lightening. As I said above I like to use a concealer that is a shade or two lighter than my own skin for this. It makes it easier and you need less to get the job done. Take the concealer brush and apply 3 dots of concealer in sort of a line in the dark circle. Use the tapping method to push most of it down in to your skin and then take your finger and blend it out from the circle to create a smooth transition. Of course make sure not to leave any obvious edges. Repeat this process until the circle is brought up to your natural skin tone.

For facial hair remnants - this one is tricky to get right and hopefully you don't need it. But if you do, again it's very much a balancing act. You are gonna be covering a fairly large area here which is not what concealer is designed for. You generally want to use the one that matches your skin tone because if you use the lighter one you won't be able to use enough without showing it. However sometimes I use a combination of both to kind of balance it out. Basically dot the concealer all around the area that needs covered and then use your fingers to blend it back in to your skin. You will use a combination of tapping and then blending like under your eyes. You can even use multiple fingers at once for the tapping. Repeat this process until you've covered as much as you can without making the concealer itself too visible. It's totally a balancing act between the lesser of two evils - showing too much makeup is bad, but showing any facial hair remnant completely destroys any chance of you really looking like a girl. If you have to make a choice here lean towards more makeup. It's not ideal, but it's way better than 5 o'clock shadow! This is one of the most difficult areas for me as no matter what razor I use and no matter how I shave I cannot get close enough. If you have that issue like me then all you can do is practice practice practice until you find the balance that is best for you. Do not be afraid to experiment either! That is key. Makeup is very much an artistic creative process and there are no really hard and fast rules. You can try all kinds of different things and wash your face and try again til you find the best option! I know there are products better suited for this but I don't currently possess any and I'm assuming you don't either! Either way I've gotten really good with this method over the years so yeah, it's what I do. :D

Advanced/optional use - this is another one of those areas where we can use something in a way it wasn't really designed to be use. One of the big difference between male and female eyes is male eyes are set further back under the browbone. Now, we can't move your eyeballs but what we can do is use light and shadow to make it look like we did! Basically what you can do is use the lighter concealer under your browbone to lighten that area. Don't do it in a conspicuous way but just very gently. Lighten that area up and then blend the edges out in to the surrounding skin. By making the area lighter it appears less shadowed and hence less further away! Again it's another area that I can't tell you exactly what you need to do and how you need to do it. If you wanna try this just practice at it until you get a good effect. Personally I do not do this, as I achieve a similar effect with the way I do eyeshadow(which is not too far away)

Another optional use of concealer is not on your face at all! When I shave my chest, I have trouble getting the area right over my sternum as clean as I'd like. If I'm wearing a shirt or dress that exposes that area, the hair remnant can totally give me away. But I can put concealer on it! It's the same basic idea as on your face - use it to lighten and cover the area and blend it back in to your skin. Basically anywhere on your body you need to lighten/cover something you can use concealer. Just be wary of it rubbing off on to other things!

That's pretty much it for concealer. At this point you should have a very nice base face for applying all the other more "fun" makeup. It's very important that you do it supremely well up to this point as I've said, since it's literally the very core off of which everything else is built. If you are new to this I'd advise you to practice just foundation and concealer over and over until you are confident you've got it right. You have some leeway in things from this point on, but this stuff is key to doing it well. Next we will move on to the eyes and the first thing we will cover is eye shadow which is my favorite makeup!
Last edited by Imaginary_Girl on 08 May 2016, 16:22, edited 1 time in total.
User avatar
Imaginary_Girl
**
Posts: 86
Joined: 21 Mar 2016, 20:58
Location: South Central United States

Re: How to do makeup well (guide for transgirls)

Post by Imaginary_Girl »

Eye shadow! Eye shadow is my very favorite makeup as I love the way my girleyes look and shadow is the main component of that. There are several different ways and methods of doing eyeshadow. Depending on the process you will use either 2, 3 or 4 colors in most cases. I will be teaching you the three color method although it's easily adaptable to the two color method by just skipping the crease color. As I've said before the #1 thing on your face that people should feel drawn to look at is your eyes. A large part of what is gonna make that happen is eyeshadow so let's jump right in to it!

Believe it or not the trickiest part is actually choosing a color palette to use. You can just pick any palette you like but there are actually some pretty nuanced things that dictate what is best for your face and your eyes. Your skin tone, your eye color, the clothes you wear and so on all play a role. Generally you want to choose colors that compliment those things and avoid colors that clash with them. Also avoid yellows/reds unless you really know what you are doing with them. Purples/greens are kind of intermediate level colors. Blues and browns are generally the safest colors to work with if you don't know what to pick. I personally use blues because they compliment my eyes(which are blue/green) and because blue is my favorite color.

Ever wondered why when you buy eye shadow that there are several different colors in there? Do you think that the people who made it are just trying to give you options? No! Each color has a different purpose and goes in a different place! There are at least as many opinions on the best way to do this as there are women in the world. I am going to teach you the method I learned as it is simple and effective. We are gonna take the medium tone and put it on the eyelid. Then we are gonna take the dark tone and put it in the crease. Lastly we are gonna take the light tone and put it from the crease to the browbone. I couldn't find a good image of this so I made this crappy one. Obviously you don't just go outside the area and all willy nilly like in this image lol, but it gives the basic idea of what goes where:

Image

Here is a random palette I found showing what you might put where:

Image

Note that you could use the 4s which are kind of sparkly to add interest to the lid area. You would do this by just adding a tiny bit of them over the base color which you had already applied. That's not their main purpose but as I said you can be creative and that's what I think of when I look at this palette!

For transgirls the biggest thing we want to accomplish here is make your eyes look bigger and like they are set more forward than they are. This is mostly accomplished by the 3rd color which should be very light(or even white!) The first color is for drawing attention and adding interest to your eyes. The second color is for adding more definition to the area and making things pop a bit more. As always the key is to blend things very well! There should be no sharp lines between the colors - they should smoothly transition in to each other.

I'm gonna take a minute here to explain something. There are SO many ways to do eye shadow and all kinds of different opinions on what is best. The truth is what I said above - makeup is very much a creative and artistic process and there are no hard and fast rules. I am teaching you the method I know and that works well for me, but I am certainly not declaring it the best method! I am mainly trying to pick the most approachable and newbie friendly ways of doing things for the purpose of this guide. You can get VERY advanced with eyeshadow and put all kinds of different things all kinds of different places to achieve all kinds of different effects. It can get very complicated - like this. You should feel very free to experiment with various different methods and even come up with your own. It's YOUR face and you know how you want it to look. Makeup is not permanent so try whatever you like and see how it turns out! If you don't like it then wash it off.

If you wanna experiment and practice with eyeshadow and not have to go through putting on foundation every single time then what you can do is just put some moisturizer around your eyes and over your eyelids(be careful not to get it in your eyes of course) in order to give the shadow something to stick to. Then you can try what you like and see how it looks. You can then wash it off and repeat as many times as you like in a much quicker way and without wasting foundation! Eye shadow is probably the most personalized part of your makeup. You can do all kinds of things to add emotion or drama or definition and stuff like that. It's certainly the area I've experimented most in. For instance with the above palette I might just use #1 and #2 with 2 on the lid and 1 on the highlight and of course blending where they meet. That would create a very strong contrast and contrast is something that draws attention and attention is what we want on our eyes! Eye shadow will be what defines the overall look of your face so yeah, don't at all be afraid to experiment and find what you think looks best! I will say though as a transgirl it's important that you pick a light color for the highlight because that is what will make your eyes look bigger and give the illusion of bringing them forward.

As I said in the introduction you do NOT want to use the crappy little brushsponge thing that will come with the eyeshadow. Get a proper eyeshadow brush. You don't have to spend a fortune, a few dollars will get you:

Image

which is more than adequate. From there it's very simple - you take the brush and brush it softly in the shadow to get some on there. Then you wanna lightly tap the middle part of the handle of the brush on something solid so to cause any loose extra shadow to come off the brush. Then you take the brush and softly brush it over the area where you want the shadow to go. For your lid, use the brush oriented vertically(or if you have a narrower eyelid - horizontally) from inside to outside. For the crease, use the brush oriented horizontally and from inside to outside. For the highlight, use the brush oriented vertically from inside to outside. The highlight area is special as the further away from your eye you get the less shadow you should be putting there so it kind of fades out in a gradient. When switching colors make sure to clear any previous color from the brush! You can do this by brushing it against the back of your hand. Once you have all three colors on there clear the brush of color again. Then take the brush oriented vertically and straddle the crease and brush from inside to outside to blend the three colors that meet there into a nice gradient.

That's really all there is to applying it! At least for this basic method. I like this method though because it does the job well and it doesn't take 60 years and a Master's degree in art! Once again I will reiterate that this is the part of your makeup that will define your overall look the most. It's is very personal and what I like you may not. I personally don't like the look of really overdone 72 color eye shadowing techniques for instance. I rarely use more than 3 colors but that's just me and that's because it gives me the look I want. As long as things are done neatly and blended well and not gawdy then you've likely done a good job and if you like it you should go with it! Next up is eyeliner which is by far the hardest thing for me to do well as my hands shake! But it's also important as I have another trick to make your eyes look bigger!
User avatar
Imaginary_Girl
**
Posts: 86
Joined: 21 Mar 2016, 20:58
Location: South Central United States

Re: How to do makeup well (guide for transgirls)

Post by Imaginary_Girl »

So because I think it's important to do this right and because I know a lot of transgirls use dermablend, I decided to try that before writing more. I have done the method I described above for a long time and I am very good at it, but it took me a lot of practice to get that way. This is supposed to be easy so yeah, this is on hold til then!
gemt
***
Posts: 313
Joined: 01 Nov 2012, 17:04
Location: East Anglia

Re: How to do makeup well (guide for transgirls)

Post by gemt »

Imaginary_Girl wrote:That's an interesting idea. I'm curious how you do that?

My own eyebrows sit in a fairly neutral position and by trimming them from below in to an arch they turn out pretty well. Personally I don't like the penciled in look but it could definitely be useful for those that aren't comfortable changing their face semi-permanently by trimming/plucking/waxing/whatever their eyebrows. So yeah I'm curious how you do this.
heres A video
Post Reply