IT’S THE ETERNAL struggle for makeup lovers and fairweather fans a like. Matching your foundation to your actual skin tone can be a nightmare for people. Nobody knows this better than beauty guru and YouTuber James Charles.
Despite being one of the biggest beauty influencers across all social media platforms, James is regularly criticised for failing to match his foundation to his neck. In a recent uploaded, he addressed the comments and decided to try and finally find a foundation match for himself.
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In the video, James can be seen swatching on his hands initially while purchasing the foundations. Later, he swatches all foundations on his face and chest, citing this as the reason as to why he finds it so difficult to match his makeup.
“Foundation matching isn’t a skill I’ve ever mastered during my time being a beauty guru,” he says. “Everyone seems to have a different rule as to where to match the makeup.”
Fair, TBH. Growing up, I was encouraged to check out makeup shades on the inside of my wrist, with little to no success. My foundations was still always too dark. As time has gone on, I’ve tried to match it to the front of my hand or my forearm, because who honestly has the time to go around with a foundation swatch on their face or neck? Regardless, while I’ve come close, I’m still yet to find my perfect match.
Makeup artist Wayne Goss reckons there’s a few ways to match your foundation – matching from jawline to neck (assuming that they’re the same colour to begin with). Your face gets the most sun exposure while your neck receives the least, so you want to find a foundation shade that matches both areas when blended into the skin.
If your decolletage is exposed, then you’ll want to match your foundation to there. Swatch on your chest, find the one that’s right for you, and bring it up on to your face. Then, you can warm your neck up with bronzer, if neccessary.
For women of colour, he recommends swatching three stripes across the face because of a thing called facial masking, meaning there’s often more than one colour going on in a skintone at any given time.
