I’ve been wearing makeup since I was 16 years old. I remember piling it on and my grandma was so scared when she saw me at my sweet 16 that she said to my mom, “you are not going to let her go out like that, are you?” This was back in the 80’s when more was better!
Read moreSimple At-Home Makeup Tips to Look Refreshed For Your Zoom Meetings
With the recent social-distancing and stay-at-home practices, the meeting game has literally changed overnight. Our meetings now happen almost exclusively online whether for an interview, work, or a catch-up with friends and family. The Zoom life can feel a bit intimidating with our faces magnified front and center on the screen so I put together a list of my easy make-up tips and tricks for you to be camera-ready! Scroll down to read about all my clean beauty faves.
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Hydrate & Prime Your Skin: I always start the day using my Olie x Melissa Meyers Golden Ray Glow Drops. This deeply hydrating luxury face oil creates the perfect canvas for make-up and leaves skin with a dewy, velvety texture! It’s formulated with active French Marine Algae, an antioxidant proven to stimulate the production of collagen. This is a multi-tasking product, and it can also be dabbed on cheekbones over makeup for a natural highlighted glow.
Use promotional code GLOWGIRL 15 for $15 off
I use the KORA ORGANICS Rose Quartz Gua Sha tool to massage the Golden Ray Glow Drops into my face. Part of Miranda Kerr’s clean beauty line, this tool works to enhance your natural beauty by sculpting the face. It helps to relax tense facial muscles, encourage blood circulation, and reduce puffiness and fine lines. Given this stressful time, it’s a great TMJ reliever!
Apply Light Coverage and SPF: Next, I follow-up with a tinted moisturizer. Two of my favorites are Coola’s BB Cream and Ilia’s Super Serum Skin Tint. These are both clean beauty lines containing SPF, formulated to even out the skin tone and hide imperfections. It’s important to remember to wear sunscreen to protect the skin from damaging UV rays if you are working near a window or outside in the garden, as some of us do here in L.A.
The formula by Coola is one I’ve been using for years and I love the medium to dark shade for my olive skin. The mineral broad-spectrum SPF 30 formula offers a barely-there feel, while a sheer tinted coverage blends and perfects your skin tone. A proprietary bouquet of rose stem cells offers an advanced bio-complex to smooth, moisturize and replenish skin's natural resilience and improve visible signs of aging.
The ILIA Super Serum Skin Tint SPF 40 is available in eighteen shades and doesn’t contain any silicones, oils, or fragrances. It’s formulated with non-nano zinc oxide to protect against UVA, UVB, UVC, blue and infrared light. Other skin-benefiting ingredients include hyaluronic acid, squalane, and niacinamide which leave the skin smooth, plump and moisturized.
Make Your Eyes Pop: Ere Perez, an Australian natural and clean beauty company, is another one of my favorite clean beauty make-up lines. Their soft jojoba oil eye pencil is not only gentle on the sensitive eye area but also contains anti-inflammatory properties, helping to soothe any prior skin irritation while nourishing, moisturizing and conditioning the lashes. This pencil comes in ten different tones, but I love the bronzed brown since it creates a natural-looking frame that subtly and beautifully defines the eyes.
I like to use ILIA Limitless Lash Mascara—it gives lashes the perfect thickness and length. I love that the formula contains organic ingredients, such as natural shea butter, as well as bee and carnauba waxes to condition and nourish lashes, keeping them long and healthy. Plus, the applicator is very easy to use, which is the key!
Define Your Brows: Another favorite of mine from Ere Perez is their almond brow pencil. It’s perfect for creating brows that look naturally full and accentuated. Since stress and hormone shifts can lead to hair loss and thinning eyebrows, this pencil is perfect for filling in those bare spots that can crop up. The sweet almond oil nourishes the hairs and the skin under and around the brows, while Vitamin-E oil nourishes the roots, stimulating the growth of thick, dark and more resilient eyebrow hair. This product comes with a brush, which is perfect for shaping brows.
Add Some Color To Your Face: We don’t want to look pasty-white on-screen, do we? I like to dust my face with a bit of bronzer and dab the apples of my cheeks with Jillian Dempsey’s Cheek Tint to add a natural-looking, healthy glow. Jillian Dempsey uses bamboo stem extract along with other natural and organic waxes to glide on smoothly while delivering the perfect flush designed to last through zoom meeting after zoom meeting!
My go-to bronzer is by W3LL People. Their Bio Baked Bronzer Powder is a universally flattering shade with the perfect soft-matte finish. It’s baked like a powder but blends like a cream and is long-lasting, flawlessly balancing out skin-tone and helping me to look awake and glowing during my video calls. Super clean and eco-friendly, it also contains special ingredients such as squalane and honokiol help protect against free radicals.
Add Some Shimmer and Glow: To finish off your best video-meeting look, I recommend adding some highlighter to brow bones, bridge of the nose, and cheekbones to contour the face and define your best features. Natural light from windows, as well as indoor-lighting, will reflect off the product and light up your face for a refreshed, radiant and youthful glow.
Below are the highlighters that I’m currently obsessed with.
The rms beauty Luminizer comes in six different shades and contains castor seed and vitamin-E oil to hydrate and calm the skin, while also giving the face a soft luminous finish. The OG of highlighters, the light reflecting sheen never feels sticky or looks glittery. I love to use this one on my brow bone.
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The Westman Atelier Super Loaded Tinted Highlight by Gucci Westman complements any skin shade and type and contains key ingredients such as hyaluronic acid to help smooth and fill-in wrinkles, caper extract to reduce inflammation and jojoba oil, an antioxidant that helps to moisturize and protect against pollution and UV damage. Since it can also be used on the sensitive eye area, I like to wear this instead of eye shadow to make my eyes pop on screen!
I’ve also been addicted to The All-Glowing Creme Highlighter Stick in Rose Gold by Au Naturale for some time now. Formulated to be clean with organic oils, it provides a creaseless and weightless finish. I typically apply this product to my upper cheekbones and brow bone. It does a great job of highlighting my best features!
Add Gloss To Your Lips: I like to add a natural, universally-flattering pink-nude color to my lips, and my current fave also contains CBD to calm my nerves…yes, please! Saint Jane’s CBD- infused Lip Shine, in the color Bliss, is combined with sunflower, chamomile, and aloe - the perfect remedy to condition inflamed, dry, chapped lips. It glides on super smoothly to soothe and hydrate.
I hope these products brighten up your virtual meetings as much as they do mine! If you have any questions about any of them, feel free to DM me on Instagram or leave me a comment below.
Stay safe, healthy, and keep on glowing!
xxMelissa
Who What Wear Feature: 5 Quick Makeup Hacks that Help You Instantly Look 10 Years Younger
My latest beauty article for Who What Wear, 5 Quick Make-up Hacks that Help You Instantly Look 10 Years Younger, highlights the five products I use daily to camouflage the reflections of time that can show up on our faces as we get older. Read on to see which makeup basics you’ll want to add to your routine ASAP to help you age beautifully!
I’ve made a commitment to continue looking and feeling my best as I get older, so I’m always on the hunt for products that can help me sustain this as a realistic goal. Many people ask me for tips on how to age gracefully or turn back the clock. I have lots of secrets in my bag to help you go back in time and erase 10 years from your face, including these five great makeup hacks below!
1. Blurred Lines
Use a Blur Primer
A good primer is a necessity when it comes to helping your makeup go on smoothly and stay put, but not all primers are created equal. To instantly give your face a younger look, invest in a good blur primer that can actually soften the appearance of wrinkles. Farsali makes a great clean beauty primer called Skintune Blur Perfecting Primer Serum. It is one of the best for achieving that soft-focus finish. I also like Line BlurFector Instant Wrinkle Blurring Primer by StriVectin for its magical optical illusion ability.
2. Wow Brows
Fill in Your Brows
Thick brows are a sign of youth. But, as we age our brows tend to thin out, so having a good brow filler in your makeup bag is a must. Ere Perez makes a great pencil to fill in those gaps that can come with age, and they also have a great gel to help groom them naturally. Their Aloe Gel Lash and Brow Mascara is one of the best in clean beauty, and it’s sweat-proof and water-resistant. I also like the Brilliant Brow Gel by BeautyCounter. It comes in different tints in case you also need a bit of a color lift and has a buildable formula to give the appearance of thicker brows. Luna Nectar’s Moon Boost Lash and Brow Serum is a newer brand that I discovered through the Indie Beauty Expo, and it’s featured in my onTuwi Boutique. I’ve been using it for around a month now and I notice tons of new growth in my eyebrows!
3. Get Glowy
Wear Highlighter
A highlighter can add definition and give skin a radiant, youthful glow. Concentrate on applying it to the brow bones, cheekbones and bridge of the nose to glow in all the right places. Ilia Liquid Light serum highlighter is amazing. Its gel-based formula gives my skin a perfect dewy finish. I also use Gucci Westman’s Westman Atelier super-loaded tinted highlighter and Au Natural’s Highlighter Stick. It’s super flattering to my complexion and also has properties to help encourage collagen production. A great drug store option is by CoverGirl. They just launched a clean beauty line, and their Clean Fresh Glow Stick is super portable and has a light shimmery finish. For an all-around glow, it’s also worth checking out the newest clean beauty product from Saie, Glowy Super Gel. It comes in a universal shade and is great when worn alone for a fresh natural glow, or under foundation. For a powder highlighter, I like PYT Upgrade Highlighter. It’s satiny, smooth and buildable for a sun-kissed glow.
For a dewy way to highlight your skin, try using the Olie x Melissa Meyers Golden Ray Drops dabbed lightly on top of cheekbones over your makeup. This new face oil is not only the perfect primer for your skin, it also leaves it with an overall velvety texture (made with active ingredient French Marine algae--proven to build collagen)!
4. Plump it Up
Plump and Condition your Lips
As we get older our lips thin, leaving our pouts not so plump! A great lip plumper will be your best friend if you find the right one. The secret is to have it moisturize and hydrate! I have a few favorites. Glossier’s Bubblewrap actually does double duty as a lip and eye plumper. It hydrates both of these delicate areas, plumping the skin, and it never feels sticky. I also love using Bare Minerals' Moxie Plumping Lip Gloss and their Gen Nude Under Over Lip Liner to help mask those pesky fine lines around my mouth. Whish Watermelon Lip Balm is great for leaving my lips hydrated. It's made with bakuchiol, a less irritating plant-based alternative to retinol.
5. The Great Cover-Up
Use a Great Concealer
Dark under-eye circles and skin imperfections can scream old and tired! This is where the help of a great concealer can come to the rescue. My fave is RMS’s “Un” Cover-up Cream. It comes in a ton of shades and never gets dry or cakey on the skin, which many other concealers tend to do. Also, I never leave home without using cult beauty must-have Yves Saint Laurent’s Touche Eclat Overall Brightening Pen, and even keep one in my bag at all times for touch ups! For super dark circles and tired eyes, they have one for higher coverage as well. It’s truly one of the best products to camouflage and brighten tired eyes. Another game-changing concealer that works wonders for hiding dark circles and sun-spots is Amazing Cosmetics, Amazing Concealer. It’s no wonder why they call it the magic eraser!
Of course, there are fantastic skincare products and other non-invasive procedures that can also help with aging softly, but many of those things take time and patience to see results and can get costly. Sometimes, it’s all about needing instant gratification. That’s when I turn to makeup hacks for their quick and easy fixes to give an immediate confidence boost! Try adding these products to your arsenal of makeup basics and let me know how you like them.
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xxMelissa