MAKEUP : Don't Conceal Your Dark Under-Eye Circles — ENHANCE Them

To date, I own no less than 10 concealers, both under-eye and rest-of-face. The two places they are applied the most are my under-eye area and around my nose — pretty much the areas where my face skin kind of just gives up in terms of radiance and looking alive. I appreciate my concealers, but honestly, what I don't like about complexion makeup in general is that it always tends to migrate either on its own to parts of my face where I didn't intend for it to be or underneath my fingernails when I touch my face. Gross.

As long as I've been documenting my face, my eyes have always been sallow and reddish around the edges — using lash growth serum (which I do all the time because it's kind of my thing, you know?) exacerbated this somewhat. Puffiness puffs and goes depending on how much sleep and/or crying I've been doing, but the shadows remain regardless.

All I really want to do is wake up, wash my face and all that, and breeze out of the house like some chic mom who's super-confident about her face and stuff. But for a while, under-eye concealer was the one thing I had to slap on — until I actually started to quite like those shadows and found myself working with them a bit. I love a good doe-y eye — kind of like a smoky eye but more subtle and sleepy.


Being tired is already a look, but who says that has to be a bad thing? Tired-looking girls are mysterious and dangerous and all kinds of interesting! If lazy-girl beauty took off, why stop there? Go full on tired-girl beauty, I say!

The very best part about my version of #tiredgirlbeauty is that it takes all of two products to make your eyes look moody AF.
I swiped a warm plummy-bronze eyeshadow (theoretically one that matches my actually under-eye circles, sort of) along my lower lash line and on the outer corners of my upper eyelid. Use a brush, use your fingers, use one of those sponge-tipped applicators — choose your own adventure.

I took a clean blending brush and stippled the eye gloss all over where I applied eyeshadow, blending outwards and tapping with my finger to damper the edges. You could use lip gloss or vaseline, but a goop meant to go on your eye area has much more tack and thus hold to it (plus it's more likely to be formulated to be safe to put around your eyes). They all crease, honestly, but that's just the nature of eye gloss, so you can't be too type-A about it.
Mascara, sure. It's up to you. But like, that's it, people! That's it! If you want, you can even skip the shadow and just gloss your eye, but I actually wanted to create a "shape," hence the under-eye circle-colored eyeshadow.

The whole look is pretty "natural" but also "haunted" so, like... a really pretty ghost girl?
I clock about six or seven hours of sleep a night on average, and there's just something about under-eye concealer that makes me look awake, sure, but in a false way. I don't want people to think I'm awake because I don't want people talking to me in the morning. I want people to see me and react, "Oh god, is she OK?" or "Damn, she's seen some shit," or even "Man, what a sulky bish" with the end result being no one bother me please.