Practice in general has gone a long way to building confidence! Secondly, I think being more comfortable in my own/with who I am and how I look has done more for building confidence in makeup, though.
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Like you Christine practice and it was helped by training through classes on and offline as well as You Tube MUA’s.
Practice for sure.
Practice has sped up my makeup process (start to finish), given me confidence to try different formulas, applications and colours. On the flip side Practice has also pinpointed which formulas, applications and colours do NOT work for me–just becuase it does on someone else doesn’t mean it will on me.
Practice’s also made me really analyze my face; what I’d like to highlight and detract from, and how to really carve it out/add dimension with contouring.
Practice and being comfortable with myself, finding out what works for a person may or may not work for me.
I don’t recall ever not feeling confident about using makeup. My mom wore it, and I’d watch her put it on. She bought me my first cream blushes and colored lip products when I was a tween.
Using was always kind of a natural thing to do.
My mom didn’t wear much eyeshadow, though. Plus, her eye color, shape, and brows were different from mine.
Reading magazine articles and tutorials, and copying their looks, helped there. I wish we’d had home computers and beauty YouTube back then!
Oh, how I would have loved to have had YouTube videos back in the 80s when I started wearing makeup.
Learning how to work with my facial features from the advice of others (mostly my cousin Debbie), and later on in time, tutorials helped me to refine and get better at application techniques. Plus; practice, practice, practice!
Besides practice and being more confident with myself as I age, having women role models wearing the appropriate makeup made me more confident.
As I grew up, in my environment women around me either didn’t wore makeup (and were proud of that), either wore too much makeup looking to impress men (and sometimes other women as well for vanity). I’m an engineer and in university few of my already few female colleagues wore makeup; same at work.
I didn’t have the examples of women that just wore makeup because they loved it. I felt uncomfortable both without makeup and with makeup.
When I discovered that I can be myself, that I can wear whatever I want, that I can be a computer engineering wearing a burgundy lipstick, I finally became comfortable. And it’s because I discovered senior women )in terms of work, not age) that set the example for me.
As an Engineer myself, I’m recognizing in what you are saying and I pretty much quote everything
Definitely practice and getting more into personal color theory recently! It’s been really eye opening (ha ha) to delve into what really works for my coloring, in terms of “temperature,” value, contrast, etc. Super fun stuff! I like to know the rules so I can break them on purpose instead of by accident.
Definitely being more satisfied with my life, not necessarily my appearance, made a big difference. I used to wear heavy makeup as “armor” when I was working customer facing retail, and then when I got a horrible stressful office job, I never wore any because I didn’t have any energy to spare. Now that I’m at home with my son, makeup is just fun again for days I want to be extra cute or put some fun colors on.
I always felt confident about wearing makeup. My mom wore it and I grew up reading fashion and beauty magazines so makeup was a normal thing. My skills, while not outstanding, were adequate. However I have always worn more makeup than my friends and the women in the offices where I have worked and I was sometimes concerned that I wore too much, even though I rarely wore lip color and always used neutral blush and brown eye shadow. It took social media to reassure me because I could connect with other corporate women who wore as much makeup as I did.
I have always loved make up! It just didn’t work well with my complexation and oily skin in my younger years so I have always loved lipsticks/glosses and eye shadows / mascara. I could really only wear a few powder compacts for YEARS! Youtube has helped me so much discover products, proper application, primers.. highlighter and my love for bronzer.. I never understood it.. but all these things help me achieve so many moods with my make up!
I, like most here, agree that practice, practice, and more practice helped me feel confident in using makeup. My mom, her mother, and my aunts didn’t wear makeup. Neither does my sister. My paternal grandmother did but we didn’t see her more than once a year. Fortunately, my dad would allow me to wear it if it was subtle and tasteful in his opinion. Fortunately, for me, I was never one to wear more “artistic” makeup. I remember spending hours with my best friend doing our makeup. Like Rachel I would have loved to have had YouTube videos back then. We had magazine’s and friends, lol.
Practice, videos, and trying on a variety of the same type of product. I didn’t know how to pick a foundation until I tried a bunch. I didn’t know cool-neutral eyeshadows looked best until I tried a variety of warm and cool tones. I didn’t know what brushes to use until I invested in them.
I practiced throughout the quarantine, even when I wasn’t working and I couldn’t meet friends or go to my yoga classes. I put makeup on anyway for the practice.
I’ve watched thousands of videos in the beauty sphere to learn to do specific things but also absorb information I wasn’t specifically looking for.
Makeup is my one vice and it’s a meditation. I invest heavily in it and I know it looks… unusual to those who know me well enough to see my collection, but it makes me happy to learn and grow and improve over time.
I’ve always felt confident in using makeup, although a little practice never hurt anyone!
I think age is one factor – I’ve learned over time what suits me, flatters me and what doesn’t (all those matte red and orange and pink eyeshadows, for example, to say nothing of matte lipsticks and warm toned blushes). That’s probably the biggest thing for me – that, coupled with not giving too much of a hoot about what others think – it’s enough for me if I like it and think it flatters me.
I have never not confident, not even as a teen. While it may have looked horrid, I was confident, and I thought it looked good.
I’m on the older side, we didn’t have computers, I learned from magazines and from studying photos in them.
My mother used makeup, but I rarely met her, my maternal grandmother always wore lipstick and used it as a blusher as well. One of her sisters used eye makeup, I thought her very sophisticated. 😀
Practice and knowing my undertones. I started with stage makeup for ballet, which lots of people feel looks like a super dramatic version of a “Robert Palmer” girl from that 80s video… Learning to tone down the eyes for everyday wear was important. But I’ve never worried much about other people, who I assumed (in my teens) just didn’t know how to do their makeup if they hadn’t been in the theatre. 🙂 Most days now I only use eye shadow (including as eyeliner), blush (including for “contour”), mascara, and regular lip balm. If it’s a special day, then some kind of colored lip balm or maybe a lipstick goes on too. This is all with lots of skincare… My mother wore make-up to work routinely, although she did it really differently to me and has pretty much the opposite undertones. So I couldn’t pick up much from her, other than learning that every person tends to prefer and/or need a really specific range of colors. I’m really glad to find much more of what I want to wear hitting the market year by year — and would like to see even more (all done as environmentally as possible) so that it’s not hard for anyone to source their stash.
What has made me more confident in using makeup for the past 5-7 years has been reading about it on this blog – learning about my correct foundation undertone was a big leap forward; using a variety of makeup brushes and buying (and having access to) better quality makeup.