Make up can make you look youthful and healthy, but if applied wrong it can have the exact opposite effect. Contouring is something people do with make up that makes their face change shape. It is designed to make certain features stand out such as cheek bones, giving your face a smooth, chiselled look.

If you really want to get your make up right then you need to practise and practise at home when you have no where to go. There are some brilliant tutorials on YouTube etc that show you exactly how to apply your make up to make you look youthful and some of them also show you what not to do.

You could also go on a make up course which is designed to give you an overview of what you intend to do with the make up and how special effects can work. These courses are often run by colleges or even by beauty salons.

Despite what magazines claim and billboards show, there are no miracle cures for stopping ageing. It is a natural process that happens to all of us but there are some things that you can do to slow this process down.

Drinking plenty of water and keep yourself hydrated will ensure that your skin has a healthy complexion. It will allow for toxins to pass through your system quickly and help to keep skin blemish free.

It is believed that leaving makeup on overnight can also age the skin. This is because it can block pores and slow down the regeneration process of cells. Smoking is another main contributor to ageing skin. Even after a few months of stopping smoking you will notice a vast improvement in the look and feel of your skin.

Sun damage is not only damaging to the skin causing it to age quicker but can also be very dangerous and can cause skin cancer. Staying out of high heats and always wearing the correct factor sun cream can help to eliminate this.

The market is flooded with anti-ageing beauty products and they range drastically in price. You can often buy supermarkets own brand anti-ageing creams for as little as a few pounds or really splash out on well-known products costing upwards of a few hundred pounds.

But do these products really work? There are varied opinions on this, some people say certain ones do and others don’t believe they make any difference at all. Brands can be very good at giving us lots of scientific terms to make you believe that what you are investing in is a sound product and will make a difference, but often these claims are not completely truthful or skewed.

If you want to try and use these products then try and research the ingredients and find out if there is any proven evidence of results. You could also ask for a few trial to see if you notice any slight improvement in the time you trial it.

Make up can be ridiculously expensive and many of us get sucked in to the trap of trying something out and liking it so therefore having to buy it time and time again although it is a little more expensive that we would like.

Foundations can make a real difference to a person especially if they have scars, spots or generally poor skin that they wish to cover but if you use it daily, can become expensive. I recently had a trial of an expensive brand of foundation and really liked the coverage it gave me but then realised that I was getting through a bottle a month and priced at £30 a time, couldn’t afford to keep using it. I then switched to a cheaper brand to give it a try and was astonished to see that it gave the same results as the more expensive one and was less that 60% cheaper. Experiment with a few different brands as you may be pleasantly surprised to find one that is lower priced but just as effective.

Face masks have been around for years and there is a huge variety of them available. They can be made from a number of ingredients and it is also quite easy to make your own face mask.

They can be a great way to freshen up your skin and return that glow to your face. They work by removing the impurities from the skin and drawing them to the surface. These then get remove when the mask either gets peeled off or washed off.

Some people swear by face masks and ideally you should use one once a week. Always do a patch test before using any new beauty product as you may not know that you are allergic to something in it until it is too late. Reactions to beauty products can be awful and can take a little while to disappear so I would never recommend using a new product right before you intend to head out to a big event.