Sephora brand compact for Green Eyes:
Sephora brand compact for Blue Eyes:
Sephora brand compact for Brown Eyes:
Silly analogy coming up, but why are makeup brands still promoting green eyeshadow for green eyes? Even worse, blue eyeshadow for blues eyes? You may have seen them - those compacts with 3 or more eyeshadows enclosed, in usually 3 different colour combos...one compact designed 'for green eyes', another for blue and another for brown. And often (if not always) the green eyes palette includes various neutrals plus green, blue is always a feature in the palette for blue eyes and the brown compact? It often houses a combo of browns and mauves.
Let's say you work in a retail furniture or homewares store, maybe Bed, Bath & Beyond or Harvey Norman. If you want to show off the gorgeous emerald green colour of some fancy cushions in your furniture store, will you go display them on a green sofa, to 'play up' the colour of the green cushions?
Or will you look around for a red sofa to throw them on?
How could the first action 'play up' the green of the cushions? They
harmonise - so there'd be nothing special to see there.
Green eyeshadow on green eyes just means MORE GREEN! You have green shadow and green eyes - wow, lots of green. But that doesn't
enhance the green. So how best to enhance green eyes? Throw those green cushions on a RED sofa and they'll virtually pop out to greet your customers at the door.
Green can't enhance green. But green's opposite (complementary) colour, red, can and does very effectively enhance green.
So why does the 'beauty authority' Sephora produce these compacts above? I'm not saying they're useless - there are some gorgeous colours there but only a quarter to half the colours in each compact would be effective at playing up the various eye colours as designed to!
In fact, I'd use the BLUE eyes palette to better enhance BROWN eyes. The BROWN eyes palette would perhaps be ok for GREEN eyes. And the green palette? Blaaaaah. I have green eyes and I'd never buy this compact! It's almost the worst option for enhancing green eyes - there's no red or complementary tones in there apart from the one shade on the very right. Remember the couch analogy?
One more example: Like the compacts from Sephora shown above, Duwop gets it a quarter right. Boo for the green eyeshadows in this 'green eyes' compact but the sandy beige colour is a good start...
Comments? Questions? More on this perplexing issue to come! :-)
So you can see red, yellow and blue - the primary colours, plus orange, purple, green - the secondary colours. In this wheel you'll also spot colours in between those already mentioned, like orange-red and green-blue etc. Those are known as tertiary colours.
Great makeup doesn't just 'happen.' If you look in the mirror and you know your makeup's just not 'right' - THERE IS A REASON WHY. It's not random! If you see yourself and think - wow, that looks better than I though it would, there's a reason for that too. Check out these pics and you'll notice how colour plays a massive role in enhancing the natural colour of eyes. These makeup artists made deliberate choices to make the blue eyes 'pop' and they got it right. How? The answer is in the COLOUR of the makeup which is also often continued in the styling/fashion.
Get a little technical with me and 'analyse' what colours have been used to enhance these cool blue peepers, in the makeup itself and/or in the clothing colour choices...
