How to Instantly Liven Up the Look of Your Eyes With Shimmering Radiance and Textures

This beauty uses shimmery pale color to open up her eye area through light.

Though I love doing a dramatic smoky eye, I always have a tendency to turn to shimmery pale shades of eye shadow for giving my eyes extra impact.  Dusting the lids with a sheer veil of sparkling pink, peach, gold, champagne, etc. seems to have the power to magically open up the eye area without much effort.  Relying on a shimmery pale shade also does perk up the look of the entire face from my experience to give the eyes more life, a bubbly sort of inner radiance, if you will.  

How Shimmer and Light Can Open Up the Eyes

When your eyes are first starting to show age, you naturally assume matte eye shadows are the only ones suitable for you at this stage.  I used to feel that way until experimenting with shimmery pale eye shadows as I shared with you in an earlier makeup tips post for brightening the eyes that totally took me by surprise.  After I noticed how much delicate sparkle of color falling against my lids enhanced without appearing overly made up, I was impressed because it was more a show of light.   

The way the color reacted on the lids was like that sparkle of sunshine when it hits your skin, illuminating it with pure light.  Therefore, I highly recommend giving the pale sparkling shadows a try because it can do more than you might image.  After all, light brightens and brings the area forward to make the eyes appearing larger whereas dark colors make the lids recede, which has the opposite effect.  

The Secret to Use Pale Shimmer Shades Effectively is All About Blending

If you want to use light shimmer eye shadow to your advantage, you can’t overload the color or risk looking gaudy.  To best pull this off, you need to blend the shade carefully.  After all, you could encounter harsh lines that would ruin that angelic effect that you’re striving for.  

Therefore, it is important to use a variety of your different eye shadow brushes such as your basic all over brush for the lid, a crease brush for softening your work that is tapered and a smudging brush with a flatter, shorter head than your flat basic, all over brush for limiting any sharpness of lines.  Having these different sizes of brushes can keep your application polished.  

Contrasting Shadow Textures Further Livens Up Eye Radiance

An interesting effect is playing with the shadow texture against the light.  When pairing a pale sparkling lid against a medium matte shadow in the same color family along with a slightly darker crease color for the far corner of the eye, you can benefit from that radiance and accent eye shape. What looks really great is using a pale rose-gold and then slightly deeper pink tones for sculpting together to shape the eye.

The important thing to remember is to keep the entire lid reserved for the shimmery shade with just enough of the mid tone and dark corner shade like a brick tone to define the shape of the eye. To really carry this off, make sure the mid tone color of whatever color family that you want to do is only slightly darker than your skin.  This barely distinguishable degree of color for the mid tone choice creates the best natural shadow when pulling this look together and blending thoroughly.  

To really make the eyes pop, make sure to line with a black eyeliner pencil that you can smudge or a matte black shadow that you use by wetting an eyeliner brush and several coats of black mascara.  Laying down a line that is too bold when attempting this technique such as using liquid eyeliner or pen eyeliner seems to diminish the effect of that glow of wholesome beauty.