Here’s a rule of thumb when it comes to make-up. If you have full lips, then downplay their fullness with matte, creamy, or glossy lipstick. As for thin or uneven lips, you can add depth to them with shiny lipstick (not to be confused with glossy lipstick). Lips appear more three-dimension if you put lipstick with shine on them, while fuller lips won’t end up looking like fish lips with matte or pigmented lipstick. Remember, reflective balm makeup for thin lips, and cream or glossy lipstick for full lips. If you’re wearing an intense red lipstick, you can downplay the intensity with a bit of sheen or polish to your make-up tool. At any rate, the difference between lipstick gloss and shine is by level of sleekness; gloss is only a little shiny, while shiny lipstick pulls out all stops when it comes to being lustrous.
Did You Know That Your Make-Up Can Be Infected with Germs?
- While it is important to balance out your look so that you won’t look like a clown or end up with make-up so light, it looks like you didn’t put on any at all (you should achieve a balance between the two extremes, although whether you should favor one or the other depends on what sort of occasion you’re attending or circumstance you’re facing), you should also be careful when it comes to the cleanliness of your make-up kit. Don’t leave your tools moist in your own saliva and sweat, plus you should never use them with a dirty mouth or face.
- Your mascara is particularly susceptible when it comes to becoming laced with microbial organisms and bad bacteria. The International Journal of Cosmetic Science itself can vouch for the fact that make-up kits do tend to become a petri dish of nastiness if you’re not careful or clean when it comes to using your tools. To be more specific, two Brazilian universities conducted research that tested forty mascara samples from real women. A whopping 79% (that is, most of the women) had staph bacteria lurking in the mascara.
- Mascara can become a medium for bacteria because it’s moist in and of itself and when stored, it serves as a dark environment wherein microorganisms can proliferate and flourish unimpeded. Expired mascara is particularly vulnerable to disease-spreading germs. The unfortunate thing about mascara is that most budget-conscious women would still keep on using a tube of the stuff even after the three-month mark, when it’s already long-expired and should be sent to the trash bin instead of your face.
- Using past-its-prime mascara is a hazard of sorts because you’re just asking for trouble by using them. However, it’s not as if you can finish off a tube of mascara for three months unless you’re some sort of airline stewardess or clerk at the bank that’s required to put on make-up day-in and day-out. No strapped-for-cash woman would want to throw away a half-full tube of “perfectly usable” mascara, unaware that doing so will put them into risk of staph infections, rashes, allergic reactions, pimples, and so forth. Also, don’t forget that the eyes are particularly susceptible to infection.
- Expired eye make -up should be thrown away as soon as possible because you might end up with even graver dermatological sicknesses in the long run if you insist on being so curmudgeonly and miserly. Don’t be a female version of Ebenezer Scrooge, because you’ll only be shooting yourself in the foot by being so unhygienic with your make-up use. More to the point, using mascara that’s older than three months can inflame your skin or even cause significant damage to it, such that you might need plastic surgery to fix it.
