Soft Glam Makeup for a Friday Night With NARS Kalahari and Mekong

I got a little gussied up because I’m going out to dinner tonight (as if I needed an excuse to put on makeup, ha!). It’s a belated Geminis birthday dinner with my friend, Marisol, who also celebrated her birthday this month.

I’m calling this “soft glam makeup,” although that’s not my phrase. I’m borrowing it from SoCal sweetheart and makeup artist extraordinaire Vanessa Haro. Vanessa does makeup for weddings and various other photo shoots for booty-licious babes, and I love her style. It’s classic yet très schmexy, and very similar to what I like to wear.

Anyway, lately I’ve been rediscovering spectacular shades from the permanent collections of some of my favorite brands, and I’m wearing a duo called NARS Kalahari in this look that I’ve worn off and on for years. It has a satiny, plummy taupe on one side and a shimmery golden taupe (you know I love those golden taupes, girl!) on the other, and both sides are drenched in pigment.

Normally when I wear this duo, I try to keep it (relatively) simple by blending the satiny plum on the outer half of my lids and my lower lash lines with a tapered blending brush. Then, I pat the shimmery golden taupe side on my inner lids with a finger and soften the edges with a matte neutral taupe or a tan shadow in the crease, and a matte beige on my brow bone (I’m wearing two NARS single pan shadows here called NARS Blondie and NARS Biarritz).

The “soft glam” part comes from combining Kalahari on the lids with the winged liner, because winged liner is cool, man! And you can modify it in an endless number of ways.

I’ve been totally into a “baby wing,” where I start from the midpoint on my upper lash line, then flick out toward the outer corner, and I do juuust the thinnest flick when I do it.

It’s noticeable, but it doesn’t take over the entire eye look, like when you use black liquid or gel liner and do a massive flick, and it takes over your entire look and you start feeling like you have to put on falsies to balance everything…

Talk about opening a can of worms.

With a baby wing, I can do whatever I want on my lids, wear a few coats of mascara, and everything looks balanced and proportional (well, I think so).

For this baby wing here, I dipped a wet angled brush into a pan of NARS Mekong, an espresso brown with golden flecks, and left the edges purposefully blurry to leave myself lots of leeway to mess up, haha. Then, I lined my water lines and lower lash lines with good ol’ MAC Prunella (love me some Prunella).

Next, I swept a small amount of peachy pink NARS Amour Blush, an all-star workhorse shade, on my cheeks and did some neutral pink action with MAC Soar Lip Liner and MAC Patisserie Lipstick on my lips.

Oh, and totally not makeup related, but I recently stumbled onto the best hair styling product to wrangle wayward baby hairs into place. I was rifling around the medicine cabinet the other day and found this paste from Kerastase that I got for El Hub a while back called Baume Double Je. It’s a medium-hold pomade. I used a little dab on the hairs around the front of my bangs and brushed it through, and it smoothed everything down, just like *that*.

Good stuff! Little does El Hub know that I commandeered it for myself, haha. 🙂

Who else is going out tonight? If you are, have fun, and be safe!

Your friendly neighborhood beauty addict,

Karen