Barefaced Beauty Tips

Let’s be honest, it would be a whole lot easier if we could just wake up and look fresh-faced without the help of cosmetics, but the world we live in today means we hold ourselves to a high standard and feel the need to cover up with the best that the makeup world has to offer.

But, try this for thought, imagine waking up and exuding natural beauty with only a few changes to your normal routine and having smooth and clear skin that you would be proud to show off, having eyelashes that are long and healthy without the helping hand of mascara, having eyebrows that were full and luscious without the need to colour them in with pencil and plump lips that felt like silk without the need to overline and overdo it with lipstick.

Trust me, it isn’t a dream that has to be so far away from reality and I’m going to teach you how. Afterall, being a barefaced beauty is the new barely-there makeup look, lets see if we can embrace it together.

First of all, how your skin looks can have a positive or negative effect on your mental state and we all know it. All it can take is a couple of late nights, a few too many chocolate bars or a salty diet to cause our skin to break out into blemishes or to start looking blotchy and uneven. And don’t even get me started on how my skin feels after a night out on the town with the girls. Alcohol is hugely dehydrating and literally saps all the goodness out of skin so when it comes to looking healthy and glowing, skip the mojitos and reach for the teabags instead!

Teabags, I hear you cry? Yes, teabags. If you have had one to many the night before (and let’s face it, we’ve all been there) a used teabag can help hide the redness in your eyes and the puffiness in your skin. This trick also works wonders if you’ve been up all night burning the midnight oil on a work project, or even panicking about a big presentation the next day. Honestly though, even if you have had your 40 winks and just need a bit of a kickstart for your skin, teabags could be the way to go.

So how do you use them? Well, my personal favourite is a green teabag, first you drink your tea, then you apply a couple of them over your eyes, focussing on the area underneath them where bags and dark circles tend to form. The antioxidant properties of green tea help to reduce inflammation and risk of irritation and the tea helps to tighten up skin leaving it looking flawless after just 10 minutes of pure relaxation.

You could always cut the teabag open and mix it with pure honey to form a scrub that you can use all over your face. This acts as a great toner as well as a gentle exfoliant to give your skin the glow that it has been craving all winter. Teabags also help to reduce oiliness too so if you tend to have oily skin in places, popping a teabag over problematic areas for 10 minutes can keep your skin looking even and smooth without the added greasiness as the weather starts to warm up.

Keeping your skin clean and clear is the key to going barefaced and feeling confident while rocking the look, but it isn’t always enough. Use a moisturiser that compliments your skin and if you aren’t fully sold into going barefaced just yet, a tinted moisturiser will help you feel a little more made up and ready to face the outside world.

Always check that your moisturiser has added SPF for going out into the sun as the burden of sunburn will only set your skin care routine back and we’re going for sunny glow, not lobster red cheeks!

So, that’s your skin taken care of, what’s next?

To really embrace the barefaced look, it wouldn’t be true if you still had to rely on mascara to get the long eyelashes you crave. And how do you get around this little obstacle? Eyelash growth serum is the answer! Eyelash growth serums have promised to do what seems impossible and it comes as a shock to most people when they find out they actually do work! Xlash Eyelash Serum is just the right product for adopting the barefaced look and within weeks it can give you not only longer lashes, but fuller, healthier, stronger eyelashes than before.

The tried and tested eyelash serum uses ingredients that promote healthy growth from deep down in the follicle and encourages each individual eyelash to grow stronger, leaving you with a perfect set of lashes that will make you wonder why you have relied on mascara or eyelash extensions for so long. Using the eyelash serum couldn’t be simpler either. It is so easy to incorporate into your existing beauty routine and takes seconds to apply so what are you waiting for?

Simply take the wand with a small amount of serum on it and run it over the roots of your top eyelashes as close to the skin as possible. It works best after your nightly makeup cleanse, while your eyes are free from eyeshadow, eyeliner or mascara and it basically just works its way in while you go to bed and catch your all-important beauty sleep. My tip is to take a before picture when you start using this stuff so that after a few weeks you can really compare the difference.

Naturally longer eyelashes no longer have to be the things of dreams, and your barefaced beauty journey can get well underway with this wonderful eyelash growth serum.

Not too dissimilar to eyelashes on this one, eyebrows can be a pain if you just don’t have the ones you want, only it’s a little bit trickier to fake fuller ones. You can’t just apply mascara to eyebrows and get the look you’re after like you can with eyelashes. But... you can use the same principle as eyelashes to look naturally longer, fuller and thicker with an eyebrow growth serum.

Just like the Xlash Eyelash Serum, the Xbrow Eyebrow Serum uses the same ingredients and botanical extracts as the eyelash serum but with a thicker applicator so you can use it on your eyelashes to promote faster and healthier growth straight from the root.

Eyebrows have always been heavily featured in beauty trends over the decades – and even centuries – as they are literally there for all to see and provide the perfect framing structure for our faces and eyes. They come in all shapes and sizes and a wild array of colours, so it is baffling how only a couple of decades ago, we made a collective choice to get rid of them. Ok, well the majority of them. How the super-thin eyebrow trend picked up and paved the way for a decade long fashion trend I will never know. But we did it and now all that remains are the painful memories of tweezing like our lives depended on it and if we are extremely unlucky, some pictures may have survived that era too.

But the good thing is fuller brows are now back in style and in keeping with the barefaced beauty trend, the only thing that should be going near our eyebrows is some eyebrow serum and maybe a pencil to help fill in some gaps and give shape.

Ok, so threading is still a thing and microblading has taken the world by storm and if tidy brows are your thing then by all means do what you need to keep your eyebrows in check and beautifully face-framing at the same time. I always keep a tweezer handy for strays but these days I’m so thankful to have a serum that helps my eyebrows stay full and thick and will never take them for granted again.

I fully believe that eyebrows and eyelashes are gifts that we should nurture and cherish as they can really make faces stand out in the right way when they are styled right and as I embark on my makeup free journey, all I need is to keep them looking great on a backdrop of clear, smooth skin and I’m set.

But there is one more thing to really give you the confidence boost when going barefaced this summer...

It’s easy to count on eyelashes being longer than before, or eyebrows being full and shapely, and even skin looking clean, clear and hydrated, but the last thing to really set off a face is a luscious set of lips, full of colour and smooth in texture, with added plumpness just be extra!

Barefaced beauty takes the minimalistic makeup look to the extreme, and not everyone feels like they can do it, but honestly if you’re taking care of your features and putting in the work to make them look good naturally, then why not show them off?

Lips can be forgotten about when it comes to their health, we might be quick to use lip balm or Vaseline to keep them from drying out or even hide them under layers of lipstick but when you actually think about their health, you can change a few things in your routine to bring them to life and really make them a feature to be proud of.

Lips naturally have a different hue to the rest of the skin on our face because the layers of skin on them is a lot thinner than anywhere else so the blood vessels kind of show through allowing a pinkish colour to shine. When we are dehydrated, they tend to change colour and can go either really light in colour or even to a darker, duller purple colour. They can look chapped and dry around the edges and even start to get flaky skin on the top layers. Hopefully your lips haven’t got to this point yet but even if they have it can be reversed with some good lip care advice.

First you want to make sure you are drinking enough water and dropping foods high in salt and drinks high in caffeine that have dehydrating properties. Then you need to gently get rid of dry skin from them using a light exfoliant, if you don’t have any to hand you can make your own really easily with a mix of brown sugar and natural honey or carefully use some warm water and a clean cloth in a circular motion to get rid of dry bits. If your lips are still chapped, be really careful not to disrupt any splits as you could open them again instead of letting them heal.

Use an intensive care lip repairing balm for a week or two by applying it before you go to sleep at night to help the healing process speed up and leave your lips feeling smooth and soft when you wake up in the morning. In the interests of keeping things minimal when it comes to makeup, give your lips a little break from lipstick and watch them start to become the lips of envy.

But... for me sometimes I like a little bit more of an enhancement to finish off my barefaced beauty look. Lips that are plump and look bigger are my dream, but I would be too scared to try fillers. So luckily there is another option, [Xlips Lip Plumping Balm]/xlips-lip-plumper). This Lip plumping balm is my little secret to having full lips without the invasive procedures or needles.

Best applied before you leave the house, whether it be for work or a big night out, this stuff contains hyaluronic acid that helps to smooth out wrinkles and ingredients that boost the blood flow to give your lips a more rounded and plump appearance. You simply apply it, then you start to feel the tingle and hey presto, your lips start to look plumper almost immediately.

Of course, feel free to apply your favourite shade of lipstick of over the top, but hopefully after reading these tips you may be up for embarking on your own barefaced beauty journey and be happy to show off your naturally enhanced plump pout.

So, now the decision is all yours, to bare or not to bare? Once you have your eyelash care routine down, your eyebrows shaped to perfection and your lips feeling super soft there is only one thing left to do. So step outside and allow your natural beauty to really shine through!