5 ways to make your face look smaller

5 Ways to Make Your Face Look Slimmer
Beyond sucking in your cheeks.

1) Grow out your brows. “Full brows make the face appear slimmer because they help to divide the open spaces,” says makeup artist Nick Barose. After filling in sparse areas with a pencil, he recommends drawing out the ends slightly: “Longer—but still natural-looking—brows contribute to the slimming effect.”
2) Switch up your hair. Downplay softness and roundness in the face by parting your hair to the side, adding in texture and waves (straight hair makes your face look smaller and wider) and asking your stylist for sharp layers and angles.

3) Do a cat-eye. “Drawing out the outer edges of the eyes with liner and a bit of smoky shadow will make the lower half of your face look a bit narrower,” says makeup artist and founder of Surratt Beauty Troy Surratt. “It’s like an optical illusion because it creates more of a triangular effect to the face. The eyes appear more prominent and draw attention away from the lower half of the face.”

4) Contour without bronzer. “Bronzers have too much warmth,” says Surratt, who recommends using powders in neutral shades of taupe with cool, gray undertones instead. “Contouring should never look like contouring, it should look more like a subtle shadow on your face—that’s when it looks natural and not stripe-y,” adds Barose. Start by adding powder around the hairline with a sculpting brush, which brightens the center of the face in contrast, then shade the temples from the arch of the eyebrow up toward the hairline on each side. For the cheekbones, Surratt likes to begin at the cartilage bump of the ear and move inward toward the commissure of the lip. Finally, sharpen a soft jawline by contouring and blending under the chin and slim a wide nose by shading from the head of the brows down the sides.

5) Highlight the center. To make your face appear longer—”more north/south than east/west,” says Surratt—highlight at the top of the forehead (where a widow’s peak would be), down the center of the nose and on the Cupid’s bow. “It tricks the eye into looking at those points and draws attention away from the wider areas.”

By Harper’s Bazaar