Tips for hooded eyes

[Meiggy]

I have hooded eyes and I’m having trouble finding a a nice easy look For my eyes. Any tips??

[RebeccaDSF]

missmai27 has great tutorials on YouTube for hooded eyes.

[Rachelmaine98]

One of the best things I was ever told when dealing with hooded eyes is to treat it like a contour! I took a stage makeup class in college and my professor was super helpful in working with my eyes. I have round, hooded eyes, and used to be really confused why my makeup didn’t look completely right. You don’t want to put a dark color in your crease because it deepens the hood. You also don’t want to highlight your brow bone as much because it will pull your hood foreword and make it more prominent. When you watch most makeup gurus do their thing, they usually darken the crease and highlight their brow bone. What you need to do is fake a crease without a hood. Create the same shape as you usually would, but above your real crease on your brow bone. Most people with hooded eyes refer to it as a “second crease”. I only highlight right at the arch of my brow. I try to stay away from winged liner because when I open my eyes my hood messes with the outer corner of my eye and hides my eyeliner. When I do do it, I keep my eye completely open and mark where my hood doesn’t cover my eyelid so I can kind of connect the dots so that the whole wing can be shown. I’ll usually only do it when I wear lashes. If you do wear false lashes be sure to get ones that are longer in the outer corner, like Farrah #12 by Huda Beauty (these are my fav!). They just extend your eyes and make them look bigger and kind of distract from the hood. Hope this helped! P.s I wish I had more pictures I’m just starting to figure this out myself 🤪

[tastelikewater]

@Rachelmaine98So helpful! My eyebrows have a naturally high arch, which means I have a TON of real estate to work with, and I’m constantly struggling with how high to blend. Plus, with all of the extra skin near the outer corners, I find it hard to blend up and out without the brush skipping and the shadow becoming patchy. This is my eye look today, and just looking at it now I can tell I should have gone higher.

[WinglessOne]

I have hooded lids plus lines around my eyes. I’ll share some photos of my lids... these aren’t exactly “nice easy looks” 😄 but they at least help show where I place shadows and eyeliner. 

My main goals are to highlight the small visible lower lid space I have and de-emphasize the hooded corner. Here’s how I usually do that: 

1. Place my crease color above my natural crease: I always use the top of my eyeball as my crease, instead of the natural fold of my lid which is quite farther down my eye. I also usually take the crease color up onto my brow bone. How prominent/bold I make the color on my brow bone depends one what kind of look I’m going for. 

2. Also bring my lower lid color(s) up to my new crease area. That kinda gives me more visible lid color, especially when I close my eyes or look down a bit. Even if folks can’t see much of it when I look straight ahead, it’s a colorful surprise when I look away. 

3. Smoke out my outer hooded corner with a darker shadow. Doesn’t always have to be a black, navy, or dark brown shadow. It just needs to be darker than the rest of the shadows on my lids. 

4. Avoid running dark eyeliner across my entire upper lid. Eyeliner takes up a lot of real estate on my visible lid, even if I tightline. I usually run eyeliner only 1/3 of the way across my lid, since I like to darken up the outer corner anyway. 

Here’s an illustration of all that: 

Spoiler

I’ve done this kind of look with neutral shadows, too. You just need a medium-dark neutral for your crease to deepen that up (in these photos, I used a deep orange), a lighter neutral to run from the crease out onto your brow bone (instead of red orange), a dark neutral for your outer/hooded corner (instead of navy blue), and a light neutral for your visible lid space (instead of bright red and white). I also ran dark blue under my eyes... for a neutral look, I sometimes run a deep brown under there instead. 

Now, some makeup artists will say hooded lid folks shouldn’t bother with winged liner. Screw that. 😂 You can either wing your top lid liner (again, I personally don’t carry my top liner all the way across my lid), or try winging out your bottom liner like I did here: 

Spoiler

Note that I also broke one of my own “rules” here, by not smoking out my hooded corner. I only had one eyeshadow (silver) to play with! But yeah, makeup has no true rules. 

Winged out bottom liner, then connected it to top lidNatural crease vs. my higher crease line

Hope some of this helps! 

[tastelikewater]

@WinglessOne that top eye look is STUNNING!

[WinglessOne]

Thanks @tastelikewater! 

[bakeamuffin]

I have hooded eyes too @Meiggy and the SephoraPro YouTube tutorials have been the biggest help in learning how to apply the shadows to best suit my eye shape. I can’t link outside links to the community so I’ll screen shot so you can see which ones to check out ☺️ 

[alexasteph]

@Meiggy I have one hooded eye and one semi hooded eye (weird, I know), and I have found the best thing is to keep shadows and liners as confined to the eye area as possible. Since my eyes are two different shapes, I don’t usually do super dramatic looks because they don’t turn out even. 

A huge wing or a cat eye with liner won’t work, and pulling color all the way up to the brow bone doesn’t either. I don’t let my liner go any further than how far my masarca fans out my lashes. I sort of have a natural ridge on my top lash line I follow. I can do a thicker line if I want that, I just make sure it follows that line and it gradually thins out as it move from out to in. 

For shadow, I always use a neutral skin colored base. I’ll use a lighter shade over my lid and one a touch darker in my crease and the outer third of my lid. I might pop a darker shade in the outer corner depending on the look I’m going for. I will occasionally highlight right under my brow bone, but not always. 

I don’t do it much personally, but one way to add some drama to hooded eyes is add a pop of color on your lower lash line, since your upper lashes/shadows will be hidden when your eyes are open. The only reason why I don’t do it too often is it just doesn’t really work with my day to day look/needs. I like doing it for events or if I think it wouldn’t be inappropriate to play around with color. 

I hope I can an easy enough to understand explanation! If you need a visual let me know, I can try to dig through some threads I’ve posted different looks so you can see what I mean. 

[Meiggy]

Thank you so much!!!