Basic Smoky Eye Tutorial

This is my go-to weekend make-up look – I’m putting in a little more effort than on weekdays, but it’s not necessarily a full night-time look, when I would add more colour, eye liner, etc. This takes no time at all to achieve, so it’s still a pretty minimal effort look when you only have 15 minutes to pull something together. I use the Urban Decay Naked 3 palette at the moment, and only add one H&M brush to the eyeshadow brush that comes with the palette. The only thing I do to prepare my eyes before hand is to sweep on some primer, just to keep everything looking fresh for as long as possible.

I use 2 colours, which I mix, for each layer, starting with the lightest. I sweep these colours over the whole lid, from middle to the outside, several times to create a pigmented look. This is quite subtle at this stage, and I have been known to just stick with this layer when I want something super simple, but this is just the first layer of this look.

You can add some more of the lighter shades here if you want, but for my second layer I jump straight to the darker brown colours for contrast. I sweep a couple of these mid-to-dark colours over the outer half of my lids, to create a gradual change from the lighter to the darker look. You can use a cotton bud to blend it in further, but at this stage I just use the eyeshadow brush to blend it together.

This last layer, the darkest colours, should just be applied to the outer third of the lid to create the last stage of the ombre effect from light to dark. Again, you can use a cotton bud to blend the shadows together to create the best gradient look, but that’s up to you really. I like to use a pointed brush to fill in a little of the lash line near the outer corner, just to give extra definition, but this step is optional, depending on how dark you want to go. You can also add a little of this darkest shade to the outer corner of your bottom lid/lash line if you like.

Finish your look off with black mascara and a pink lip.