Use Cotton Swabs and Scotch Tape to Fix Your Makeup

Every makeup diva has a few tips and tricks up her sleeves, and I'm going to share some of my favorite fix-anything makeup tricks. I'm sure a few of these, perhaps even all, are known by many of you readers out there already. What I always advise women to do before applying makeup, no matter how little, is to start off with a clean canvas. What I mean by that is to make sure your face is cleansed properly, moisturize if you need to, and apply primer. I would also recommend keeping these items in your makeup kit at all times, cotton swabs, skin balancing concealers for dark circles and redness, and Scotch tape.

A nifty little product that I recently discovered was Physicians Formula's Mineral Wear 3-in-1 concealer. I'm a minimalist when it comes to makeup. I prefer to keep it clean and simple; as little makeup as possible, and I absolutely love this product. Physicians Formula Mineral Wear 3-in-1 concealer comes with three miniature tubes of concealer for your different cover-up needs. Each tube comes with a handy little sponge tip applicator and the sides snap together like Lego blocks. The three concealers are yellow, light (or whatever your skin tone is) and pink. For those who aren't aware, the yellow concealer is used to balance out dark circles around your eyes. The regular concealer is for your general imperfections. The pink is for highlighting. I would highly recommend picking up this product. It's affordable, costing just around $6, and it comes with three products to meet any of your cover-up needs.

Cotton swabs are another handy thing to keep around. I even keep a few in a little baggy in my purse. Makeup cotton swabs are ideal because they have a pointed tip, but regular cotton swabs will work too. They're great for a lot of things like cleaning up or fixing messes and mistakes. I'm no makeup artist, but I'm sure even the experts make mistakes from time to time. I use cotton swabs primarily to clean up my mascara and eyeliner, especially when I use liquid eyeliner. Sometimes the lines are too obviously disproportionate, too thick, or I get some around my eyes where I didn't mean to. Cotton swabs are great for little messes like these because it allows me to clean up, or fix a mistake in a small area without ruining the rest of my eye makeup. They're also perfect for cleaning up eye shadow fallouts, and smudging shadow or liner for a smoky effect.

The last item I like to keep in my makeup bag is some Scotch tape. Yes, the kind you use to wrap Christmas presents. I like Scotch tape because they're not too sticky and won't leave any residue on my skin. Not only are they great for picking up lint when you don't have a lint roller around, but they work just as well on your skin. This is by far my favorite way to clean up eye shadow fallout. For light fallout I use a cotton swab, but for days I'm wearing darker shadows I prefer Scotch tape. Some dark shadows, and pencil liners, will smear or really stick to your under eye makeup when using a cotton swab. But if you use Scotch tape to pick it up it won't smear because you're lifting up the fallouts instead of trying to sweep it off. I've also seen people use Scotch tape as a guideline for really dramatic eyes.

So there you have it, some of my favorite makeup products, tips and tricks to fixing just about any makeup oopsies. All these products are travel friendly as well since they're compact enough to be carried around in your purse. I would skip all the different concealers and just pick up Physicians Formula 3-in-1 concealer because it's much more compact, and the tubes snap together so they stay together.