Whether you’re a professional or an amateur, makeup is a lifelong learning experience, and you’ll make mistakes along the way. However, some of these mistakes never end up being corrected and they evolve into bad habits. Let’s look at some of the most familiar makeup mistakes and the reasons why you should be avoiding them.
1. Not Cleaning Your Brushes
Your makeup brushes are going to be rubbing all over the most sensitive and visible skin in your whole body. Unwashed, the bristles can accumulate old makeup, dirt, and skin oil over time. Brushing your face with them can lead to acne as the debris clogs your pores. On top of that, unwashed brushes can also harbor bacterial colonies and a collection of viruses, which can cause infection.
Aside from these concerns, your makeup will appear duller as it gets mixed with all the other dirt that’s collected on your brush, and the layers of sebum that collect on dirty brushes will return to your face, reducing its reflectiveness and dampening the impact of your makeup even further. Finally, all that dirt may even damage your brushes’ bristles, causing them to break off.
By the way, you should never share your makeup brushes with anyone else. Sharing brushes means layering other people’s dead skin, oil, and germs on your face.
You don’t have to clean your brushes every day, but every 1-2 weeks you must do so with a spray-on cleanser, whether store-bought or homemade. Then, once a month, fully wash them down with water and cleanser.
2. Using the Wrong Part of Your Skin to Match Foundation
People often perform foundation matching on the most convenient part of their body, but skin isn’t the same everywhere. Different parts of your skin receive different degrees of sun exposure and vary greatly in tone and texture. Your neck is cast in shadow when you’re outside so it will be much paler than your face, while the back of your hand will very likely come in a different shade.
The best place to match your foundation is your chest, which receives a similar amount of sun exposure as your face, and whose skin tone is relatively even and comparable to your face. An alternative would be your jawline, though some people have jawlines that vary in tone.
3. Storing Makeup in the Bathroom
For the most part, people do their makeup on a vanity table, dresser, or in the bathroom. However, of these three places, makeup should never be kept in the bathroom. This is because the heat and humidity of the bathroom can dry out your products and make them less effective. On top of that, this same environment can also make your makeup a breeding ground for bacteria. Instead, you should store your makeup in a cool, dry place like a drawer.
4. Sleeping With Makeup on
Hard night of partying, or a late night at the office? It’s tempting to just skip the tedious makeup removal step and just plop down on your bed and leave your makeup on. However, this is one of the most important bad beauty habits to break. When you sleep, your body regenerates your skin, rebuilding and repairing damaged cells. Leaving your makeup on will interfere with this regeneration, clogging pores and sucking out all your skin moisture, aging it and leaving it dry. You may even get various infections, irritation, acne, and wrinkles.
Always take that extra time to wash your makeup off. If you’re absolutely too tired to go through with it in the bathroom, consider using something like micellar water to remove your makeup quickly even if you’re already in bed.
5. Regularly wearing waterproof mascara
There’s nothing like mascara that doesn’t run down your face at the slightest taste of water. However, waterproofing your mascara comes with its own severe drawbacks. For one, the chemicals used to provide waterproof mascara with its water resistance tend to dry your lashes. Waterproof mascara is also harder to remove, so when you take it off, you have to rub harder, stressing the sensitive skin around your eyes and possibly breaking your lashes too.
Consider switching to normal mascara for most occasions, reserving waterproof mascara for special events.
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