Welcome to Make Your Face, a makeup tutorial series with a simple mission: makeup by you (me) for your (my) own entertainment, Establishment-style.

My local Michaels Craft Store is remodeling, so a bunch of stuff is on sale. This was 99¢!

The smaller one makes for better Vermeer verisimilitude, but look at the size of that thing! The choice is obvious.

You can purchase an iMagic flash palette on Ebay for, like, $10–15.

Start with the highlights.

Here is a stupid personal aside: my eyebrows are naturally really, really blonde, SO much blonder than the hair on my head. I enjoy my invisibrows when I’ve got my hair bleached and I highly recommend bleaching your eyebrows, actually — it’s awesome! BUT. Since I dyed my hair black, my eyebrows look a MILLION times more plausible if I not only color them in with powder every day but ALSO dye them so the little sprigs of hair don’t look like this weird invisifuzz dusted over some black lines drawn on my forehead.

Since I hit the brow dye I’ve realized that: 1. I like having visible eyebrows to make skeptical expressions with and 2. that it’s tough to cover up glorious raven’s wing brows with makeup! Even in this faded, half-grown out state it’s impossible to make ’em disappear without more work than I really want to do, so. Just make sure to smush a bunch of paint in there.

Girl’s got noticeably bright lower waterlines.

Steps 3–17 are: look at a picture of the painting really closely and try to copy the color placement! (You will fail because you have zero patience and he was Vermeer, but try anyway!)

So Bob Ross right now.

Clean off extra color before blending!

Basically, this:

Corpse with a Pearl Earring? Naw, girl.

Lips!

Blot.

Suddenly remember your neck!

T-shirts make for really excellent turbans.

See?

Too short.

Just right!

Make sure everything’s tucked in properly.

Then apply a white highlight to the lip.

A little red in the center, and. . .

IT’S TIME!

This thing is seriously freakin’ heavy.

But SO worth it!