While we love lips in all shapes and sizes, we also love the magic of makeup when it comes to experimenting with structure and exaggerating features. The ‘lip flip’ makeup technique may not be new, but for the uninitiated, it involves overlining lips to recreate the poutier silhouette that procedures like the Botox Lip Flip can give (Botox relaxes the top lip, flipping it out). Only this way, you can wipe it off at the end of the day and play with a different look the next.
Makeup artists have been using the technique for decades and the rest of us got wise to it thanks to the boom of social media, but it's one thing knowing the insider beauty hacks. It's another thing pulling them off, and if you've never been able to nail your lip liner, we have just the tutorial.
Celebrity makeup artist, Ash K Holm (who counts Madelyn Cline, Ariana Grande, Shay Mitchell and Khloe Kardashian as clients) posted a video to her Instagram where she walked followers through the exact steps she takes to create full-looking lips.
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“If you wanna learn how to do a ‘lip flip’, keep watching. This is a technique that I do on my clients,” she says. She takes a brown-toned nude lip liner (choose one that's a similar shade to your natural lip colour) “and I'm just overdrawing the centre of the lower lip,” she explains. As for your top lip “[be] very careful to overdraw just the cupid's bow,” she says. Ash likes a natural nude to do most of the shading for you “then we'll go in with another shade to kind of blend everything together and accentuate that lip flip,” she says.
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She takes a small lip brush to soften up the lip liner, then goes back in with the lip pencil to sketch in the corners of the lips “pretty tight to my natural lip line.” For extra dimension, she goes back in with another lip liner, which she recommends be around three shades darker than the first. “I'm keeping it pretty tight to the line of the lips that I've already created,” she explains, adding: “this is where that depth is really going to come into play and it's just going to add even more definition to this technique. I'm also shading the corners of the top and bottom lip, and again, using the brush just to soften everything up,” she says.
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And for the final step, “the centre of the lip flip technique should be a natural pinky hue,” Ash says. So, now you're in on the secret the A-list use for fuller-looking lips.
For more from GLAMOUR's Beauty Editor, Elle Turner, follow her on Instagram @elleturneruk
