The 13 Best Contour Palettes for Natural-Looking Definition, Tested & Reviewed
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You’ll look like you’re in perfect lighting all the time.
InStyle / Joy Kim
Many people — even those who love makeup — associate contouring with cartoon-like, over-drawn, over-exaggerated features that often just look silly, not sexy. The trouble is, it’s not quite so easy to master the contouring technique without overdoing it, and there are a truly shocking number of neutral browns, taupes, and chestnuts out there that make selecting the right one for your skin tone as stressful as a high stakes game of poker. Now for the good news: Any worthwhile contour palette contains a range of shades within the same tonal family, presenting you with a one-and-done, versatile collection, explains celebrity makeup artist Vittorio Masecchia. “Our faces range in color, texture, and shape from season to season, but honestly also from day to day," says Masecchia. "A palette will help keep makeup looking cohesive no matter what variations you experience with your skin."
With guidance from three celebrity makeup artists, we curated a list of 24 best-selling contour kits, and our editors, each with a variety of skin types and textures, individually tested each one. We evaluated each contour palette for its color payoff, noting whether the shades were buildable or overly pigmented, how evenly the product smoothed across our skin, whether its texture and finish enhanced our natural features without looking overpowering, greasy, or drying, and lastly how easy or difficult it was to use the tools.
Best Overall: Hourglass Ambient Lighting Palette
What We Love: The pearlescent formula provides a gorgeous contour and an all-over radiance.
What We Don’t Love: Its shades are initially very pigmented.
You didn’t read the description wrong: This is technically a finishing powder palette, but many people, including Kate Moss, love it as a contouring palette. Similarly enthralled, we loved how the three soft powders layered like magic on top of each other, making it easy to achieve a natural look or something more intense. And, they didn’t look patchy on top of our foundation, dry patches, or breakouts no matter how many layers we applied. We evened out redness and patchy spots with the lighter colorways and manipulated the darker shades to create depth and dimensions. Additionally, Hourglass developed the formula with photoluminescent technology which subtly blurred and camouflaged our skin imperfections and gave us a radiant, sun-kissed finish.
Formula: Powder | Number of Shades: 3 | Colorways: 3 | Key Ingredients: Diamond powder, mica | Finish: Radiant
Best Affordable: e.l.f. Cosmetics Cream Contour Palette
What We Love: The creamy texture buffs into the skin without much effort and looks great on its own or layered with other products.
What We Don’t Love: Perfect shade matching can be tricky.
This cream palette from Elf really simplified the entire contouring process. Even on our rough and bumpy complexions, the quartet of warm colors didn’t skip or drag the way drier formulas do (that’s what causes the dreaded “muddy” finish). We were super nervous that this rich and creamy formula would sink into the fine lines around our eyes and clog large pores, but, delightfully, it smoothed over these problem areas like fresh pavement. The dewy finish it leaves also means the creamy contours play well with other face makeup, so you can layer on your favorite bronzers, powders, and blushes to create a wide range of looks. While we had to mix the shades together to find our perfect match (even the darkest shade didn’t quite fit our skin tone) their serious blendability and natural finish earned our forgiveness.
Formula: Cream | Number of Shades: 4 | Key Ingredients: Mica, synthetic wax | Colorways: 3 | Finish: Dewy
Best Splurge: Tom Ford Shade & Illuminate Highlighter & Shader Duet
What We Love: This palette streamlines your routine with just two shades, one to create dimension and the other to illuminate.
What We Don’t Love: The coverage is subtle.
Less is more with this palette, which features two shades — one contour and one highlight — to give your skin an ethereal ring-light effect. While the pearly white highlight left a subtle, dewy glow when we applied it across our cupid’s bow and under our eyebrows, its dark matte counterpart was a bit more pigmented. Still, we blended it out with minimal effort when we used a makeup sponge rather than a brush and gave the lightweight creamy formula a few seconds to dry between adding layers. Though the matte shade has a thicker texture, it felt airy and cloud-like on top of our oily skin and never sunk into pores or fine lines.
Notably, the formula was recently revamped to include hydrating botanical oils and a consistency that applies as a cream but diffuses into a satiny finish, making it very easy to buff and blend. And, each of the luminescent shades are made of brightening ingredients, including moringa and passion fruit oil, as well as ginger extract to neutralize hyperpigmentation.
Formula: Cream | Number of Shades: 2 | Key Ingredients: Light-diffusing pearls, moringa and passionfruit oils, ginger extract | Colorways: 4 | Finish: Natural
Best for Fair Skin: Smashbox Halo Sculpt + Glow Face Palette With Vitamin E
What We Love: Warm and cool-toned shades complement pale skin with a perfectly pigmented amount of color.
What We Don’t Love: It takes around three layers to see a more intense color payoff.
Streaking dark brown powders and rich creams across snow-white skin sounds like a recipe for clown makeup. However, between the buildable coverage, natural-looking colorways, and ultra-fine powder formula, we’re convinced Smashbox created this palette to quash the worries of our fair-skinned friends.
Despite the intimidating-looking, vibrant colors, the Coral Saturation palette impressed us with how its bright orange and chocolate brown shade warmly kissed pale skin with color rather than garishly contrasting against it. In fact, the matte powder is so fine we questioned whether our brush picked up any product at all but sure enough, we saw forgotten features start to take shape as we brushed the contour and sculpting shades along our jaw bones, sides of our nose, and cheekbones. Topped off with the shimmer highlight, this palette was made for romantic soft glam looks, and since it’s so buildable, we’ll still keep it handy for when the occasion calls for something a bit bolder.
Formula: Powder | Number of Shades: 4 | Colorways: 4 | Key Ingredients: Vitamin E, passion fruit oil | Finish: Natural
Best for Mature Skin: Danessa Myricks Beauty Groundwork Defining Neutrals Palette
See at Danessamyricksbeauty.com
What We Love: The finely milled powders and velvety creams smooth across textured skin without emphasizing fine lines, large pores, and blemishes.
What We Don’t Love: All the shade options can be overwhelming to beginners.
Packed into this chocolate box-shaded pan are ten rich, pigmented powders and coordinating cream colors, opening the possibility to create any look we desire. Our brushes easily picked up the product and we hardly had to touch the brush to our skin to see a major color payoff. Each shade, whether we used matte powders to softly sculpt features or radiant creams to create more defined lines, blended like fine silk across dry patches, bumpy acne, and crow's feet.
Keep in mind that the large palette is perfect if you’re looking for a one-and-done product for browns, eyes, lips, and face, but it will take up a good chunk of space in your makeup kit.
Formula: Powder, cream | Number of Shades: 10 | Colorways: 2 | Key Ingredients: Glycerin, squalane | Finish: Matte
Best Professional: KVD Beauty Shade + Light Powder Face Contour Palette
What We Love: This refillable palette offers six super blendable and pigmented shades, all with the same skin-brightening formula.
What We Don’t Love: There is some fallout.
You can give your selfie arm a rest — this KVD palette will capture and enhance all your best angles. Each of the six shades — three for highlighting and three for contouring — is paired on top of the coordinating partner so it was simple for us to know which two to use together. Their velvety soft texture applies similarly to a cream formula and sweeps daringly across our skin, delivering a blendable and smooth wash of color. The lightweight texture sat evenly across our textured skin and never made the appearance of our large pores, forehead wrinkles, or crow’s feet more noticeable.
Although the matte finish gave us pause — we feared it would emphasize our rough patches – the formula’s hydrating blend of wild rose extract, safflower seed oil, and vitamin E prevented any hint of caked or cracked-looking makeup. There’s something to gain from each shade, but if you reach the bottom on one color before the others, it’s easy to refill the magnetic pots.
Formula: Powder | Number of Shades: 6 | Key Ingredients: Wild rose extract, safflower seed oil, vitamin E | Colorways: 1 | Finish: Matte
Best for Glow: Charlotte Tilbury Filmstar Bronze & Glow Contour Duo
What We Love: These beautiful shades are impossibly easy to buff into skin, offering a glowy, lit-from-within warmth.
What We Don’t Love: It’s not the best option for full glamour.
This duo ranks as one of the best Charlotte Tilbury products — word on the street is that even Victoria Beckham wears it. As we seamlessly blended the powder into our foundation, we were stunned that its ultra-fine formula refused to stick to any rough patches or crease into a single fine line.
Of the the two shades, which are encased in an eye-catching Old Hollywood-style palette the pearlescent option is the most noticeable and illuminated any area we highlighted, like our cheekbones and brow bone, and the bronzing shade softly sculpts and refines the areas around our nose, jawline, and the top of our forehead.
Once blended, we were left with a natural-looking finish and a lightly bronzed glow. However, if a full glam look is what you’re after, it may be best to skip this one, as the coverage, while buildable, is on the lighter side. On the flip side, because it does offer a softer look, it’s a great option for beginners who are perfecting their technique.
Formula: Powder | Number of Shades: 2 | Key Ingredients: Mica, rice starch | Colorways: 1 | Finish: Radiant
Best Contour Highlight Palette: Natasha Denona Tan Bronze & Glow Palette
What We Love: The trio of shimmer shades and one contour powder offers a bronzed, baked glow in a few easy sweeps.
What We Don’t Love: It only comes in one colorway.
Whether you’re traveling somewhere warm, or just want to look like you did, this palette can fake a bronze better than your favorite self-tanner.
The tan blush-bronzer hybrid gave our cheekbones a warm, flushed finish, and when we paired it with the powder highlight and shimmering cream blushes, we swear our skin could light up even the darkest room. Plus, the texture felt heavenly on our skin, and the smoothing effect it offers is even better. One note: With only one set of tones, the deeper shade means it might give a more dramatic look on those with fair skin.
Formula: Powder, cream | Number of Shades: 4 | Key Ingredients: Mica, shea butter | Colorways: 1 | Finish: Shimmer
Best for Dark Skin Tones: Melt Cosmetics The Deep Cream Bronzer and Contour Stack
What We Love: The creamy formula melts into the skin and adds dimension with minimal effort.
What We Don’t Love: Coverage from the deepest contour shade is subtle.
Each shade in the neatly stacked magnetic Melt Cosmetic contour kit fuses with our complexion like a second skin, thanks to its creamy, hydration-packed vegan formula. What’s more, we didn’t notice a single area where these balmy creams accentuated the textured areas around our breakouts.
Created specifically with dark skin tones in mind, each shade complements a separate undertone — warm, olive, and neutral — to stave off a white or gray cast other shades can leave behind on darker complexions. Out of the five colorways, we gravitated most toward the concealer cream shade because it brightened our under eyes and didn’t leave behind a chalky residue or highlight the fine lines around this area. On the other hand, the deepest contour shade had minimal impact on our overall look, but at least its subtle coverage never appeared orange or muddy.
Formula: Cream | Number of Shades: 5 | Key Ingredients: Olive glycerides, silica | Colorways: 1 | Finish: Dewy
Best Matte: MAC Cosmetics Studio Fix Sculpt and Shape Contour Palette
What We Love: The formula is lightweight and buildable, and the shade range is suitable for every season.
What We Don’t Love: We wish the highlighting shades had a bit more shimmer.
We adore MAC's avant-garde colors and striking looks, especially when Saweetie and Cher endorse its otherworldly collabs, but the brand also knows how to formulate excellent products for everyday wear too. Case in point: This palette is filled with matte powder shades that we swirled and suffused together to create a skin-mimicking finish.
The edited, simplified product contains versatile shades, such as “Emphasize” a light cream we apply to every inch of our face, including our lids for an eye-brightening swatch of color. Best of all, this fine powder avoids a muddy or dry finish, no matter how many layers we apply, and provides our oily skin with a smoothing matte finish.
For a brand known for its over-the-top electric blue liners and luminous glitter eyeshadows, we expected the highlight shades to have a bit more va-va-voom. Yet, they still provided a subtle radiance thanks to MAC’s use of soft-focus filter technology, which reflects light to provide a slight blurring effect similar to your favorite translucent powder, but better.
In typical MAC fashion, the palette is travel-friendly and sturdy, with a surprisingly large mirror. Our one other wish would be that the brand made it refillable so that we could customize the colors and easily replace shades.
Formula: Powder | Number of Shades: 6 | Key Ingredients: Squalane, barley extract | Colorways: 2 | Finish: Matte
Best Blush and Contour Palette: Make Up For Ever All-In-One Face Palette
What We Love: This contour kit includes shades for your entire face, including foundation, concealer, contour, blush, and highlighter, all within one compact palette.
What We Don’t Love: It settled into the fine lines under our eyes.
If you want to save space in your cosmetics case, Make Up For Ever has you covered. Within this sturdy, portable, and robust palette are hues intended for sculpting, highlighting, bronzing, and blushing. After some trial and error, we discovered the 12 shades showed up more prominently when we applied them with our fingers rather than a sponge or brush, which soaked up much of the creamy product. For the most part, they mixed well with our foundation and layered across textured skin seamlessly, save for the concealer shade where we noticed a little creasing around our under-eye folds. Despite its radiant finish, the formula left zero oily residue behind and instead imparted a healthier glow rather than a greasy sheen.
Formula: Cream | Number of Shades: 6 | Key Ingredients: Sunflower seed wax, evodia rutaecarpa extract | Colorways: 2 | Finish: Radiant
Best Buildable: Fenty Beauty Match Stix Duo Contour Highlight Set
What We Love: The creamy and pigmented shades layered seamlessly on top of each other and with our other makeup.
What We Don’t Love: Having a blush shade would really make this a winner.
Matched with our foundation, this cream contour and highlight duo was an unstoppable force against persistent breakouts and dry spots as it sneakily concealed them with a smoothing layer of product. With worries of flaking and cakiness off our minds, we easily manipulated the texture across different areas of our face and, since it didn’t dry too quickly, seamlessly blended it out into a natural, skin-like finish. On top of being super buildable, the rich, pigmented shade contrasted beautifully against our deeper skin tone, with zero chalky or orange residue left behind. And, for once, the highlighter noticeably popped off with a dewy, shimmery radiance rather than applying sheer like other options we’ve tried.
The easy-to-grip, chubby stick-style applicator makes this an especially approachable product for beginners – simply apply it directly to the area you want to enhance and buff out with your fingers. However, we wish it came with a coordinating blush shade to tie together the entire contouring process in one go.
Formula: Cream | Number of Shades: 2 | Key Ingredients: Coconut oil, vitamin E | Colorways: 4 | Finish: Matte, shimmer
Best for Oily Skin: Anastasia Beverly Hills Powder Contour Kit
What We Love: The matte finish sat evenly against our oily skin and didn’t emphasize texture or look overly dry.
What We Don’t Love: It takes a while to build up the shades.
It’s difficult to find products that don’t grip to our bumpy texture or separate on our oily skin, but these ultra-lightweight powders gracefully swept over slick spots, acne scars, and large pores in one even coat of coverage. We really enjoyed using the kit alongside our liquid foundation — not only adds dimension, but also because the powder formula set creamier products in place. The shades are on the lighter side, which is great for everyday use, and with some patience and practice, we eventually built them to a more striking look. Alongside the two matte contour shades are three highlight colors, which are deceptively shimmery in the pan, but in reality, they provide a subtle radiance that’s ideal for oily skin types who want to add glow without emphasizing their existing shine.
Formula: Powder | Number of Shades: 6 | Key Ingredients: Silica, vitamin E | Colorways: 1 | Finish: Matte, shimmer
What to Keep in Mind
Formula: Your skin type, desired look, and experience level play a role in determining which formula, either cream or powder, is best for you. According to Vittorio, creams offer a hydrating, brightening, and dewy finish ideal for dry skin types, while powder tends to be more matte. Those with oil-prone complexions will benefit from using a palette with both cream and powder, says celebrity makeup artist J. Brandon Correa, Tapping on a cream “allows for a very natural, skin-like finish,” he explains, and finishing the look with a little setting powder will lock your makeup in for all-day wear. For a more dramatic or dewy look, Correa suggests applying a creamy product on top of your foundation.
Shade: Unlike choosing a foundation or concealer, celebrity makeup artist Kenneth Soh says that because contour palettes are trying to cover as many skin tones as possible, they usually only offer a couple of shades. “However, you can also mix colors to customize a shade that’s perfect for you,” he adds. To find a cool tone optimal for your contour, Correa recommends picking hues that are at least two to three shades deeper than your complexion. Additionally, Soh suggests looking at your skin in a “well-lit, balanced environment” and choosing the shade that matches the color of the natural shadows on your face.
Application Method: While some formulas easily blend into skin using just your fingers, Soh says that to get the best results, you should be using a brush specifically designed for contouring. Try ditching a big fluffy one for one that has more densely packed bristles or an angled top. “You’re trying to carve out contours,” he explains.“Contouring requires a smaller brush to apply accurately and deliberately to hollow out an area.”
Your Questions, Answered
How do I choose a contour palette for beginners?
Where individual compacts only give you a single result (and hog space in your cosmetics bag), a huge advantage to contour palettes is their collection of hues to streamline the contouring process.“Most palettes should have multiple light and shimmer shades for highlighting and deeper tones for bronzing and contouring,” says Correa.
But you don’t necessarily need an extensive palette to achieve your makeup goals — smaller palettes, with a contour and highlight shade, still give you what you need to achieve to sculpt and highlight your features.
Do you contour before or after foundation?
Unless you’re practicing a more advanced technique such as underpainting, you typically apply contour products on top of foundation and skin tints. Correa recommends starting with matte highlighters first to avoid over-contouring or bronzing. “When you start with the deep shades, it might look ok until you apply a lighter shade right next to it, then it can be too bold.” Next, use the light matte shades on the high planes of your face, including your cheekbones, nose bridge, above arches of brows, and chin. Buff the deeper shades down the sides of the nose, as well as right below your cheekbones in a diagonal, from your ear toward the side of your nose, and along the jawline. Finish by brushing the shimmer shades on any area you want extra radiance.
“Pro tip: I rarely use one color for what it is — I will gently tap into multiple deeper shades when adding contour or warming up the complexion as this will allow for a more dimensional finish,” says Correa.
How do you pick the right shade for your skin tone?
Unlike choosing a foundation or concealer, Soh says that because contour palettes are trying to cover as many skin tones as possible, they usually only offer a couple of shades. “However, you can also mix colors to customize a shade that’s perfect for you,” he adds.
To find a cool tone optimal for your contour, Correa recommends picking hues that are at least two to three shades deeper than your complexion. Additionally, Soh suggests looking at your skin in a “well-lit, balanced environment” and choosing the shade that matches the color of the natural shadows on your face.
Why Shop With Us
Irene Richardson is a writer covering fashion and beauty trends. For this story, she researched dozens of popular contour palettes, tested the buzziest palettes herself, and interviewed three makeup artists, Vittorio Masecchia, J. Brandon Correa, and Kenneth Soh.
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