How to Create a Holiday Beauty Look for Under $15
The holiday season may be "the most wonderful time of the year," but it is also the busiest. Between family gatherings, holiday parties, and "White Elephant" swaps with your friends, calendars tend to be booked solid from Thanksgiving through New Years — which means there are so, so many opportunities to play with holiday makeup. The good news? You can create full, festive face for less than $15.
Celebrity makeup artist Vincent Oquendo, who works with celebs like Bella Hadid and Hailey Baldwin, partnered with e.l.f. this holiday season and sat down with Teen Vogue to reveal the best way not to break the bank in pursuit of holiday beauty: Look for an affordable, multi-use palette that will serve you double (or even triple or quadruple) duty to create multiple looks. His pick? The e.l.f. Holiday 50 Color Eye & Face Palette — which retails for $15, and he used to create two totally different but equally stunning holiday beauty looks. "This palette is really fabulous for the makeup novice or the makeup expert. Because if you are not very familiar with makeup and you want to start trying to play with color, this is a great price point and the colors are really pigmented," he says, noting that the palette comes with 40 eyeshadows, five blushes and five bronzers.
With any palette, he explains, you can even get even more bang for your holiday buck by making small tweaks to the way you apply the product. "I could use one eye shadow and create a multi-dimensional look because it's just a different application," he says. "So you can just apply it with a brush dry, and then you can take it and apply it heavy in the corner with your finger to give that strong pop of highlight. And then I wet it and I apply it on the lash line, so it gradiates from really pigmented to soft and blended."
Even if you're not on-board with all the glitter that tends to go along with holiday beauty, there are still plenty of ways to get into the festive spirit with your look. "Just, do the unexpected," says Vincent. "It's a very exciting time in beauty, so. If you're not a glitter lover, then you have all these other [options]... "We're seeing blue lips, we're seeing black lips, we're seeing, you know, all these amazing colors. All these amazing textures."
With that in mind, this season Vincent is trading the usual red, green and gold tones for something totally unexpected on the holiday circuit: A bit of blue. "I want to inspire you to create a holiday look using your blues and your greens and all of your yummy jewel tones," he says.
For this look, Vincent creates a blue metallic smoky eye by blending blue shadow shades from the crease to the outer corner of the eye. He added some dimension by dotting the inner corners of the lid with silvery white. He dusts the cheeks with subtle hint of blush and highlighter (his trick for contouring is to work the brush upwards and go from the ear to the top of the eye, and moving lightly back and forth in small motions), and finishes things off with a nude glossy lip.
For something a bit more candy coated (which is based on a look that Chloë Grace Mortez(http://teenvogue.com/tag/chloe-grace-moretz) wore earlier this year!), Vincent paints the crease with a pigmented turquoise eyeshadow (pro tip: wet the brush to get a higher impact color) and applies a lighter coat of the same shade under the lash line. He uses a shimmery pink blush on the contours of the cheeks, and pairs it with a glossy pink lip.
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