How to Uncover Your Taste in Makeup

Have you ever looked into your cabinet and realized you’ve been hoarding so many makeup products without actually using them? With trends coming and going by the millisecond, it’s no surprise that we can’t keep up.

Uncovering your personal taste in makeup can help you narrow down your makeup collection, save money, and establish your own personal brand.

Not quite sure where to start? Keep scrolling for some tips and tricks on how to uncover your taste in makeup.

---

How Do I Know the Right Makeup for My Face?

Have you ever followed a step-by-step makeup tutorial by a random beauty guru on YouTube, only to get disappointed when the end result looks nothing like what you imagined?

If you don’t learn your own face first, then you’ll never find the right technique, texture, foundation shade, or what have you, because all of these really just depend on your own features. For example, some people favor pencil eyeliners, while others have to use sharp liquid liners for their eye shape. Those with rounder faces have to contour different points in the face than those with naturally angular features. Lipstick colors won’t look the same on someone who has a completely different skin tone than you do.

This is a good rule to follow for other areas as well. When you’re scrolling through Pinterest looking for closet pegs or watching a Lazada fashion haul, make sure that you’re looking at the clothes and not at what the person looks like wearing them!

A pro tip is to find your “lookalikes,” people with similar features as you so that you get a clearer picture of what a makeup style, lipstick color, or eyeshadow palette will look on you. In my experience, it also helps to follow beauty content creators that have the same skin type as I do.

---

How To Find Your Makeup Style: Tips and Tricks

Want to find the makeup style that suits you the most? Here are some of our tips and tricks to help you out.

1. Assess Your Current Makeup Bag

Before you log into Pinterest or YouTube or go through piles of old beauty magazines, remember that you’re trying to find your personal makeup style.

At this point, you’re probably not a blank slate, but someone who has built up a collection of products that you liked and loved and used over time. Even though you may feel like everything is just an incohesive mish-mash, everything in your makeup bag actually represents your style, or at least your style’s potential.

Take a look at which products you use the most. What color lipstick do you use every day? Which eyeshadow palette has already hit pan multiple times? What colors do you see the most, and which brands? Do you tend to go for Asian makeup styles or Western beauty trends? All these are jumping-off points for you to expand and explore so you’re not just going in blindly.

I also say that looking into your own bag or cabinet helps you ground your style. Often, we get carried away with looking at what other people are wearing or how they’re doing our makeup, so it’s good to have a jumping-off point from your own backyard.

2. Create a Mood Board

Once you’ve studied your own makeup collection, you can then use different resources to create a visualization of what your style could be. Some useful places to look are:

• Beauty magazines
• Pinterest
• Instagram explore page
• YouTube
• Reddit

It also helps to follow our earlier tip of finding a makeup “lookalike,” a.k.a. someone who has similar features as you. You can even look at local influencers and celebrities for inspiration.

Once you’ve got your mood board down, you can gain a new perspective on what your style and taste look like from afar. For example, even though I often use light makeup and colors, my mood board shows plenty of eccentric and colorful styles, so my personal taste contains a mix of both.

3. Learn the Right Technique

That last point brings us to this next one: learning proper technique. The right way to do makeup, whether it’s eyeliner or lipstick, or contour, heavily relies on your own unique facial features.

I used to follow just anyone’s makeup tutorials on contouring and wondered why it didn’t turn out quite the same, even though I tried my best to follow everything the person did. But it didn’t quite work, because right from the beginning, we did not have the same facial structure.

I have hooded eyes, the person had almond ones. I have a rounder face, the person was on the angular side. So, you can see why it wouldn’t make sense for me to be following a makeup technique made for someone else’s face.

This is where it comes in handy to follow local YouTubers and beauty gurus because they’re more likely to have useful tips. Not only are our features more similar, but they also know the right beauty products for the climate, where to buy them, and other useful tidbits that you can’t really get anywhere else.

4. Keep Practicing

I know, we’re all tired of it! But practice really does help improve our weak spots. Just make sure you’ve got a bottle of makeup remover and cotton pads at the ready.

5. Experiment

Discovering your style shouldn’t feel like a chore. That’s why I firmly believe that you’ll only ever find it if you stop focusing on being perfect and just focus on what you naturally gravitate towards.

Personally, the pressure and guilt that comes with having to look a certain way or being presentable for other people have been bad for discovering my own taste in makeup. You have to break the rules a little here; if you’re only sticking to what you already know or what other people teach you, then I don’t think your makeup style will ever truly feel personal.

I mean, have you ever tried on a random eyeliner look because you were bored and found out it actually looked incredible, and even better, made you feel awesome? It’s these moments that can really help you solidify what you like and what you don’t, as well as find a balance between technique and self-expression.

6. Document Your Journey

One of the best things about embarking on something new, whether it’s learning a new skill or trying to master your personal style, is that you get to watch yourself grow. Documenting your makeup journey helps you see your progress in a tangible form and also lets you pinpoint which areas you could improve on and which parts you like.

Capturing your makeup looks on camera also helps you determine how the products translate into a photo. Does your foundation have flashbacks? Are the colors too pigmented on camera? How well does the eyeshadow detail translate?

I personally love taking photos of myself just playing around with makeup. I usually don’t post them, as they’re more for personal use, but I love capturing this experimentation stage where I’m not wearing makeup for other people, but just having fun and trying on different looks by myself. Often, I find that it’s easier to express my own style like this, not when I feel pressured to look good because I have to go out or something.

7. Don’t Put Yourself in a Box

People evolve, and so does style. We’re not the same people we were 20, 10, or even a year ago, so don’t expect your current makeup taste to stay the same forever. It’s completely normal to be drawn toward multiple makeup or fashion styles, too, so don’t limit yourself to just one.

---

Final Note

Finding your own style is a lifelong journey, but it doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy it! We hope this guide was helpful in uncovering your taste in makeup. Let us know in the comments what you want to read about next.