I hate the shape of my face. Help?

[feyith]

Argh! I don't know what to do with myself. I feel like I have a very stupidly shaped head. It's too big for my body and oval and flat. (Most people have a convex face. Mine is almost concave.) My chin and forehead feel disproportionately huge. If I turn sideways, you can draw a straight line through my forehead, nose, lips and chin. If I look straight on, my face is weirdly round and if I smile, it is pretty much all cheeks but at an angle it's sharp and pointy and unflatteringly skinny.

I don't even know where to start!!! Is there a particular way I should be doing my blush? Contouring tips? Am I even using the right colors for me?!?

Sigh.

I know I'm being kinda bratty and melodramatic and should be grateful for my health and all that, but some days...you know, I just get so tired of looking in the mirror or at pictures of myself and thinking, "Eww...what the heck happened here?" I have a big photo shoot coming up this weekend where the photographer is offering to give me some headshots, so I'd like to figure out how to look nice because I don't get offered headshots very often.

Thanks, ladies!

-Emma

[Cupcake]

A few months ago, there was a news article about an experiment which psychologists did on a very large scale. They interviewed innumerable people asking who the most beautiful women in the world were, past and present. They specifically asked what exactly was beautiful about them... was it a nicely shaped nose, their colouring, a certain je ne sais quoi allure...? They found that the perfect women would have a symmetrical face, evenly balanced features and they got all excited hypothesising about attractiveness and fertility theories. At last, the perfect woman was attainable...!

Thanks to the joys of computers, they were able to photo-composite the perfect face relatively quickly. When they did, she looked really rather plain. She had no quirks, no "character", no "soul", nothing about her caught the eye as cute, endearing or particularly alluring.

You see, it was the contrast that made all those other features on women stand out. Angelina Jolie's eyes only look captivating now that she had some clever make up artist fix her brows (google for old photos of her in her Billy Bob Thornton days, she looks nothing special). Same with all these other famously beautiful women and every single one will tell you of something that they hate about themselves.

You were given quirks and imperfections just as you were given grace and beauty - all your own. Your fingerprints are different to everyone else who ever lived and I believe God made us all that way to remind us that He made each one of us differently and uniquely to be our own person. See yourself as unique and precious and "individually crafted" or "bespoke" and you'll soon change how you see yourself.

So don't worry about what makes you different because nature intended and science has proven that that is what sets you apart as beautiful. Enjoy it. x

[happyhiker]

Wow. Well spoken Cupcake. Enough said.

Emma - I bet you anything that if you were to post your picture here, no one would see what you see.

[lwoodall10]

Emma, you are gorgeous!

[Oxana124]

Emma I have seen your pics and you are absolutely beautiful!

[karen]

Well said Cupcake!!!! She is very very right- there isn't one universal standard of beauty, and playing "the numbers" in Photoshop yields someone unremarkable. Try to imagine Marilyn Monroe without her mole, or Lucy Liu without her freckles, or Padma Laksmi without her scar. Meh....just another pretty face. Padma Laksmi wrote a great article about her scar.
http://www.lakshmifilms.com/padma_lakshmi_press2.htm

You're gorgeous. Don't let anyone tell you anything different. You are going to a PHOTOSHOOT....

[zeebs]

I don't even know where to start!!! Is there a particular way I should be doing my blush? Contouring tips? Am I even using the right colors for me?!?

I'm with everyone else... you are beautiful the way you are.

But, if you want to contour, simply place the dark shade on areas you want to appear less prominent and light shade on the areas you want to appear more prominent. That being said, you can't just place dark shade all over your chin and forehead, but if you carefully grade it darker at the top and bottom of the face, your profile might be a little softer, and you could perhaps shade the sides of your face so the appearance is less round. The high light shade should go on your nose and cheekbones and upper lip. Of course, that's just general advice, you can find lots of vids on YouTube about contouring.

Don't stress! Loving yourself is the most effective way to achieve a confident, attractive glow from within!

[feyith]

Wow, Cupcake...I guess I've never really thought about it like that. It's just so hard to let go of certain comments when you've grown up to the other kids saying things like, "Did your face get run over by an ironing board?" Kids are plain mean, I know.

I thought the self loathing would go away when I finally broke into acting and modeling but in some ways, it has gotten a hundred times worse because I have people telling me what I should do and look like all the time - or I'll thumb through a photographer friend's portfolio and think, "Gosh, these girls are so much prettier than me. Why are my eyes so beady? I'm only half Asian, why do I have a monolid?!?"

Thanks for reminding me that I do love my scars and freckles.

Okay, now that I have taken a deep breath...

Thank you, ladies! Zeebs, I will give that a try today.

What do you use for the highlight colors?

Now that I am calm, I would love to ask for color and application suggestions. I don't know the darnedest thing about makeup and it feels like I either just don't wear any, have someone else do it or wear the exact same colors and do the exact same look all the time, which I honestly don't even know if that's the way I should be doing it given my features.

Here's my facebook album, which is mostly candid face and profile shots. I am open to all ideas.
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=- ... 471a7a4889

Thanks again.

-Emma

[Silverfern]

I agree with everyone, I also want to throw out there that most celebrities have heads that look too big for their bodies in real life. There was some study about that about 10 years ago. (Why, why are people "studying" these things). I don't recall the details, but turns out famous people really do have big heads.

[egerandi]

I have no suggestions for shading, just wanted to stop by and say that you're supercute and supersweet on all of those pictures (except when fierce).

Yup.