STEP ONE The usual advice treats blush as an afterthought, the thing that ties everything else together, but this method of choosing colors puts blush in a primary role. My rationale is that blush has a relationship with all the colors of your face—a creamy complexion (it is also possible to sculpt cheekbones, blur blemishes, or give a sunkissed impression), eyes glow, and a balance is struck between skin and hair. Match it, intensify it, tone it down, complement it, contrast with it... any shade that references a color that so strongly flatters your face is sure to please.

STEP TWO Lipcolors that clash with your One True Blush are likely to clash with you. But one that matches it exactly is bound to be your perfect YLBB. Made richer, it becomes sophisticated, for work, for fall, whatever. Sheer it down and neutralize with lots of beige/lilac (depends), and you've got your perfect nude. Or intensify its natural tendencies by brightening it, darkening it, or adding red or orange or purple or brown, and you've got a dramatic lip without guesswork. Lips are easy: variations on a theme.

STEP THREE It feels odd to say this, because it is such oft repeated advice, but I don't find the neutral/warm/cool divide very intuitive—people are all so different and they wear their faces in such different ways. "Warm colors on warm skin, cool colors on cool skin, and brown, a neutral, works everyone." I believed it; nobody offered ever anything to the contrary, except... I have warm skin and wear cool colors exclusively and brown makes me look ill. I can only come to this sad conclusion: this is crap advice. In my experience, colors either complement or contrast with each other. Anything that falls in between usually looks dull and unfavorable, though I am not sure why this is so. Take, for example, red. It looks lovely with plum (a complement) and pleasantly shocking with sky blue (a stronger contrast). But lavender or forest green would make indifferent pairings. But switch to a coral, and the same lavender and forest green would be excellent. What the best colors do, is draw attention to something in particular, like the green of your eyes, while referencing your One True Blush, so it also generally flatters: a feedback loop.

I suspect this is why makeup artists tend to rely on the same products over and over again as "universals"—there are only so many blush shades, in spite of the fact that skintones run a much wider range. Look at the colors below, I've tried to select diverse colors and colorings, but in spite of that, they do kind of bleed into each other, do they not? These common shades are complementary by nature. Consider Clinique Black Honey: it's supposed to work on everyone, right? (Whether it does or not sees considerable debate.) Why? Because most blushes are pink, and a sheer glossy blackberry is really just a richer version of that color. Probably, those who cry against it are advocates of peach or coral. Contrasts, as the name implies, lie in direct opposition. It may be a matte vs. frost (a subtle contrast, there, but some people prefer monotone palettes), light vs. dark, warm vs. cool (this is where it's actually useful), or more commonly, the color opposite it on the color wheel (for reference, pink/red and blue, peach/coral and green, plum and gold, are perfectly opposed).

Labels: beauty notes, eyes, face, lips, philosophy, terminology