Happy eyes

Photo via www.maccosmetics.com/
Photo via www.maccosmetics.com/

Asian beauty trend makes its way to North America

By Brittney MacDonald, Life & Style Editor

As some of you may know, a new beauty trend has been sweeping Japan and Korea. Recently it has even begun to infiltrate our own, North American market. “Happy eyes,” as it is called, uses light and neutral shadow pigments to emphasize the under-eye bags. It employs the same general idea as contouring, but on a smaller, more focused scale.

Basically, what you want to do is line your lower water-line in white or pearl, then apply a light, shimmery shadow along the lower lash line and below, stopping at the lower ridge of the eye socket. Once finished, take a brown shadow—a shade or two darker than your highlighting shade—and apply it softly in a line just beneath the lighter shade. Try to keep the brown shade contained, and don’t blend it out too much, as you want it to be fairly defined. When you’re done that simply apply a white or clear mascara to your lower lashes, and voila! You just turned your eyes “happy.”

Rocking this look should give you larger looking eyes, which in turn will also make you appear more youthful and awake. If you have small eyes, or an oval or heart-shaped face, using this technique will help you balance out your features. For people with more angular faces, and/or already large eyes, doing this might appear a little over the top. You can, however, apply the same general idea by using a pale champagne shadow, or something with a subtle glitter, to make your eyes appear brighter.

Worried about how this might look with your darker skin tone? Don’t be. Recently Buzzfeed released a video where various women of different ethnicities tried Korean beauty products. One of the products was a shadow pencil from Etude House made specifically for this purpose. Though the severity of the look varied from woman to woman, universally they all had larger looking eyes—and none claimed that the technique didn’t work because of their skin tone.