Masterclass - Lighting and How It Effects Colour Cosmetics

Your shopping for foundation and it looks great in the shop, you skip home put it there and well it's just turns out wrong. One of the factors is the lighting and this not only effects what foundation looks like but any colours cosmetics that you are going to use.

To understand this more we're going to look at the different categories of light: Natural and artificial to see what effects they have on cosmetics.

Natural Light

Unfortunately natural light is the leas forgiving for showing any imperfections and badly done make up. Daylight is the purest form of white light, and shows colours and textures to their fullest in make up. Sunlight does only falls on the face from above, it reflects onto the face from any light coloured surface that it hits, including walls and floors. Colour also looks more stronger in daylight.

White light is made up of seven colours: Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, and Violet.

Artificial Light

These effects can vary depending on the light used.

Filament lamps using normal light bulbs can produce a yellowish light, this can dull effects of blue-toned colours and make red tones darker. If the light bulb is covered then it pushes the light downwards which then can produce sharper shadows.

Fluorescent lamps (mostly used in retail stores) give out a harsh bluish-white light which take any warmth of colour out of it. These tubes are usually covered by diffusers which can soften the light and disperse it better so it seems less harsh on the face.

There are some warmer fluorescent tubes in stores and in artificial light these are the closest to 'natural' light that you can get.

With any lighting you will also need to consider he intensity of the lighting that is being used. This is the distance that the light needs to travel to reach the surface that is being worked on. Intense lighting of theatre or camera shoots can provide a very washed out effect with little colour coming through. this is why stronger colours are used these type of uses so they can still show up when being used.

Light also plays a significant part in contouring a face (which we covered in last weeks Masterclass). Light falling onto the face from above reflects off of the boner parts of the face like nose, cheekbones and chin. Typically shadows fall under brow bone, under the eyes, nose to mouth line (called naso-labial folds), under the cheekbones, and under the chin.

This can be balanced by using other directional lights. These pictures below were from a lecture I went to the other week at Olympia Beauty. They demonstrate a mini photo shot using directional lighting to illuminate the face and counteract any shadows.