Beauty Tips and Tricks for Mature Skin

Eagerly requested by the mums of our team members, we’ve compiled a bunch of tips and tricks to help mature skin look its best (with some bonus tips about eyeshadow and eyebrows). It is so important to match your foundation to your skin type, but it is equally important to make sure your eyes and brows are framing your lovely skin too!

Foundation:

The best foundations for mature skin are hydrating and dewy foundations with a light to medium coverage. As a makeup artist who has worked on hundreds of mature women, my go to foundations are always Giorgio Armani’s Luminous Silk and L’Oreal True Match Super Blendable Foundation! These ranges have a huge selection of shades, so you should be able to find your perfect foundation shade match amongst them.

If you have certain spots or blemishes that require a little bit of extra coverage, we love the Morphe Fluidity Full-Coverage concealer. It’s hydrating formula and small applicator make it perfect for small touch ups without highlighting fine lines.

Matte, full coverage foundation is a big no-no for mature skin. It would be nice if it acted like crack filler, but unfortunately full coverage foundation settles into fine lines and makes them stand out more. Same goes for powder – use it minimally and only in high shine areas like the t-zone. A little bit of glow will make you look younger, so don’t mattify it all away!

Blush, contour, highlight:

As we age our skin becomes thinner and our faces can lose some of its underlying fat making cheekbones look more pronounced. Those still blessed with baby fat often try to contour this fat away. For those with mature skin, we don’t need to hit the contour so hard as the fat loss and thin skin naturally makes our cheekbones more pronounced. In fact, contouring cheekbones further can age a face further. To give yourself a youthful glow we recommend ditching the contour and focusing on well placed blush and targeted highlighting.

Adding blush to follow your cheekbones and brushing it upwards helps to make your cheeks look more full as well as to lift the face. Nars Air Matte cream blush in Rush and Lancome 041 Figue Espiegle are my go-to blushes for people of all ages!

Adding a small highlight to the tip of your nose, your chin, and the centre of your cheeks will make your skin look healthy, vibrant and young. If you want huge bang for your buck, Flower Beauty Shimmer and Strobe highlighting palette will make you GLOW. For a more subtle glow, we love the Inika and Inglot highlighters.

Eyeshadow:

When it comes to eyeshadow, our rules apply to placement only, so don’t be afraid to experiment with colour. If you have a visible eye crease, we recommend keeping the eyeshadow at the crease line (not blending too high up on your brow bone). Keep the blending tight around your crease line, with darker shades on the outer edges to give them an extra lift.

As we age, gravity grabs a hold of the skin below our brows causing eyelids to become more hooded. Due to this, it is important to adjust your makeup techniques to adapt to this. You can create the illusion of a higher eyelid crease by gently placing a brown eyeshadow in the outer corner of your eye then blending it in a line across your eyelid toward the top of your nose (but don’t bring it past your eyebrow). Place the initial eyeshadow with your eyes open, but close your eyes after to ensure the eyeshadow in the counter corner touches your eyelashes.

My next recommendation for mature eyes, though it may sound a bit wild, is a smokey eye. Kris Jenner is hardly seen without a smokey eye and there is a reason for it. Can you think of a better way to hide crows feet than hiding them underneath black eyeliner and eyeshadow? To keep it fresh, rather than blending the black with greys, I recommend finding a nice neutral brown to blend it with. For black eyeshadow, I love MAC’s Carbon and for brown shadow you can not go past the Urban Decay Naked Palettes.

Eyebrows:

Thick fluffy brows are not just for Cara Delevigne (or at least that’s what I’ve been telling myself with all beauty salons closed during lockdown) – they are a great way to frame a face to look more youthful. If the 90s didn’t do enough damage to everyone’s brows, aging just makes them even thinner, but there are ways to give the illusion of full and fluffy brows. Brow lamination and brow tattooing are some professionally aided ways to give the illusion of full brows, but I find pencils work well too.

I have tried countless brow pencils over the years, and there is one thing that I have seen to be true too often: people always choose a pencil that is too dark! My brows are a dark brown, but I fill them in with a blonde pencil. When you're filling out your brows, get a pencil only a few shades darker than your skin - any darker than that and your brows will look too dark and too heavy.

Try not to make the shape of your brows too sharp, a gentle curve with a subtle arch close to the outer corner of your eye suits almost everyone and will ensure you don’t end up looking like Ursula.

At the end of the day, makeup is all about experimentation, self expression and fun so while these tips will give you a youthful healthy glow, it is you that knows what makes you feel the most confident. If you want to find your foundation match in one of the products listed above, head to our foundation shade finder here to find out which shade will suit you most!