Makeup Rut? 🤔

Hi angels, how are you? I have a few days off work so I decided to sit down and practice some makeup. I haven't really been feeling motivated to do any looks because I'm bored and frustrated with where my makeup habits have landed. I've been looking at youtube videos and just googling inspo in general to find some direction to go in and I finally came to the conclusion that I just wanted to work with more makeup and colors in general!

It doesn't necessarily have to be gyaru and I think that way of thinking was really holding me back. I had this weird fixation that everything I did had to be gal or gal adjacent and honestly, that's just not fun. There's so many possibilities with makeup and sometimes I just want to go out with Korean/Chinese style trendy makeup and not worry about how gyaru I may or may not look. I'm going to try and let go of that way of thinking and just be me, whatever that may look like on any given day. 

I think the fun thing about fashion and makeup is that you don't have to be locked in to whatever aesthetic or trend you're obsessed with all the time but I'm curious to see how I can transform my gyaru look by being more open to other makeup styles and trends.

It would be nice to find new ways to do my gyaru makeup but unfortunately I don't think a lot of the dramatic eye shapes suit me, which is why I don't do them or participate in styles like manba which require really exaggerated application/placement. They look really fun but it's just not something I'm interested in and I enjoy the way my makeup turns out when I do the things I'm used to.

That being said, I felt very limited so I went searching for something else and I realized that I don't play with shadows that much. I tend to gravitate towards the same colors so to remedy that I ordered a bunch of new makeup (which I'll show in a separate post) and started researching new eyeshadow techniques & placements.

I think it will be really fun to play with makeup more in general and find ways to make my gal make more unique to me, like how Dede or Waccho do. I'm really excited to start this new chapter.

I sat down and tried to do a smokey purple look but I didn't like how it turned out and couldn't get any good pictures of it really. I put on an outfit and tried really hard to get some photos I liked out of this but couldn't so I just sat at my desk staring into a mirror, wondering if I should just start over.

Here's what it looked like (please excuse the fallout I was really upset and couldn't be bothered to clean it up):

Maybe I would've liked this more if I curled my hair but I didn't want to do anything to it as I just washed it from refreshing the color. I need to style it on Saturday for another wedding I was invited to so I can't do anything with my hair until then (lived in hair holds style the best!).

Anyways I really hated the look but wanted to salvage it so I wondered if just changing out my lashes, lenses and redrawing the eye shape would help... and it did!! I really loved the result after making these changes.

It was really interesting to see the difference these changes made so I put the pictures of the makeup side by side for reference.

In my initial application I went with a cat-eye shape for the shadow (for absolutely no specific reason at all lmao I wasn't really thinking about it), which prompted me to do a winged liner. That along with the closed droop and smaller/ more natural sized lens ended up closing up my eyes and having the overall look read less gyaru imo. 

Switching the lenses out for enlarging ones, rounding the shadow, using bigger top lashes while also opening up the droop gave me a more balanced silhouette and looked a lot more gyaru to me.

I'm glad I was able to figure out what I didn't like and make the appropriate changes. I'm going to keep experimenting and learning new techniques & placements to keep improving!

I hope you enjoyed reading my rambles here 😭 Let me know what you think I could've done better or what you would've done differently! Talk to you again soon~