Because your skin changes with time, gaining fine lines and wrinkles, switching up your beauty routine could be just what you need to maintain your youthful glow with each passing year. In fact, Lauren Hale, a makeup artist and beauty expert for women over 40, says several simple beauty tricks can make you look years younger. She recently shared her five most clever makeup tips for revitalizing your look and taking years off your appearance.
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Hale says there are several reasons women stop wearing eyeliner as they get older. Besides struggling to choose the right color, many women find they have more texture on their eyelids as the years pass and that their eyes start to hood. This makes eyeliner harder to apply, she explains.
However, Hale also offers a solution for easy application. “If brushes or eye pencils make it difficult to apply eyeliner, try this Q-tip trick! It makes applying eyeliner easy and the soft tip makes blending easy and gives a soft liner look,” she says in the caption of her video demonstration.
“Take some tape and apply it to the edge of the eye angled up to the tail of the brow. Pick an eyeshadow color (any color you want) and apply it to the Q-tip, and run it next to the tape. Pull the tape off and you have the perfect eyeliner look. You can take whatever is left on the Qtip and run it under the eye, too!”
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Next, Hale recommends applying your contour higher on your cheekbone, rather than in the hollow of your cheek.
“Because contour is going to provide that natural shadow to our face, putting it too low on our faces makes us look even older,” she says in another video from a Good Morning America segment.
Hale explains that, as we get older, we lose collagen in the skin, drawing the appearance of our features downward. “So when you place that contour higher on your cheekbone, because we lose that fullness in our face, this is going to give you that instant cheek lift,” she says.
Hale says there’s another common mistake women over 40 make when applying their makeup—and she has a beauty trick to fix it.
“What people do wrong with concealers is we take our concealer and we bring it down into this triangle pattern and then we fill that in,” she says while applying a triangle of concealer under a model’s eyes. “The problem with doing this is we think we’re concealing our under-eye circles, but we’re actually getting underneath here where all the fine lines and textures of our eye are—and so we’re actually bringing out those fine lines and wrinkles because light attracts light.”
Hale suggests lightly applying your concealer in an upward, diagonal line, starting from the outer edge of your eye and working toward the hairline. This will brighten and lift, without drawing attention to any fine lines or under-eye wrinkles you may have.
In a separate TikTok post, she takes this method a step further. After blending concealer beside each eye, she adds concealer under her brow arch and under the hollows of her cheeks. This is “the easiest way to naturally lift your face,” she says.
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The makeup artist adds that as we get older, the skin loosens around the eyes, including on the eyelids. This can make it difficult to apply eyeshadow if you try to apply it horizontally, from the inner to outer corners of your eye.
“You’re almost fighting the skin. And if you’re going back and forth and fighting the skin, you’re going to get a lot of skipping and you’re not going to get a smooth application,” she says.
Instead, she suggests using a dense brush to apply your eyeshadow from top to bottom. “By doing that, you’re going to get a nice, smooth finish on your eyelids,” Hale notes.
Many women find that as they get older, their makeup routines become set in stone. Hale says that you should try to break out of that pattern by experimenting with different colors, including in your mascara. In particular, she notes that replacing your black mascara with brown can be “a good option for a soft, natural, everyday makeup look.”
However, she also says if you love black mascara, you don’t have to give it up entirely. “It’s not about having to give up the makeup looks you love as you age, it’s about trying new things!”
