I have always been a little insecure about my dark circles. It wasn’t until a few years ago that I would go somewhere without covering them, so much so that I’d often travel with a tube of concealer in my purse “just in case.”
Oftentimes, we wear makeup to make our skin “look better”—airbrushed pores, smoothed fine lines, evened discoloration can all be achieved with the right foundation or concealer. And when it comes to those pesky dark circles, I figured a brightening concealer would do the trick. A well-known makeup trend over the last decade, I’d sweep on a concealer two to three shades lighter than my actual skin tone to the under-eye, followed by an equally as vivid banana or whitish setting powder. The idea being that the lighter and brighter the shades, the less visible my pigmentation would be—thus, illuminating the under-eye. This worked to a certain extent—only if I found just the right shade to cover my pigmentation. But if I chose a shade too pale or with the wrong undertones, my under-eyes suddenly appeared gray or blue. At first, I chalked it up to just a poor shade match on my part. Then at some point, sitting fresh-faced in a makeup artist’s chair, I realized nary a brightening hue in sight. I was skeptical, naturally, but I left her chair forgetting dark circles lie beneath my flawless look.
To make my look appear more natural, she instead used an under-eye color corrector. “Dark circles aren’t created equally,” says celebrity makeup artist, groomer, and esthetician Britty Whitfield. “Everyone’s complexion is different; therefore, the blood vessels around the eyes will emit different hues due to the sheerness of your under-eye skin.” This is where color correctors come in—working to counteract this pigmentation. I liken it to an artist painting with a color wheel. It may seem complicated but it’s actually quite simple. “For lighter skin tones, a warm peach will cancel out the blueish purple in under-eye darkness, and a true orange/red will work best for darker complexions,” says celebrity makeup artist Nick Lennon who counts Charli XCX as a client.
And as any good makeup routine does, prep starts with proper skincare. “I neutralize darkness under the eye by first beginning with an eye cream,” Lennon says, who is partial to Caudalie’s Vinoperfect Dark Circle Brightening Eye Cream. Whitfield agrees, though she is partial to an eye serum like Osea’s which “has a rollerball built in for massaging, depuffing, and [boosting] circulation for the lazy girlies.” She says massaging the eye are is key, with the applicator, gua sha, or cryo ball, “to manually provide circulation around your orbital bone to break apart the dense capillaries beneath the thin under-eye skin.”
