eye makeup

Aug 25

Eye makeup is different for everybody. I’m more on the minimal, modest, casual style. With my eye makeup progression, I wanted to show how my lifestyle affected the beauty of my eyes.

In Photo 1, I was studying interior architecture and you can see under my eyes that I wasn’t getting enough sleep. Same time in Photo 2, I was interning at the Seattle art municipality, adding to my full plate and sacrificing self-care. During this time, my eye care was the last thing I had the time and mental capacity for.

In Photo 3, during lockdown, I tended to look at my face as a list of problems. I got caught up in the beauty industry, desperate to fix me. Every time I looked in the mirror, I had a habit of leaning in and picking my acne, getting lost in attacking my face.

Something in me told me to start meditating so in combination with inner healing and outer healing, I was developing an honest approach to beauty. I dedicated more time to healing my acne by keeping a journal to track every product I used. This gave me time to heal my skin and accentuate my eyes.

A little later in photo 4, I continued experimenting with makeup and falsies. This is when I was doing the float marathon which inspired me to spend more time with nature and write a post for Float Seattle which then started this whole Spa Research blog.

A year later, in Photo 5, I moved to Los Angeles and started Meditation Teacher Training. This was like a boot camp for developing inner work, healing my nervous system, traumas, default mode network, and my window of tolerance.

You can see that the more I meditate like currently in photo 6, the bags under my eyes are becoming less pronounced. This was just a few weeks ago when I found Stirbee reincarnated, the bags are almost nonexistent.

I started to worry less about external gratifications like entertainment, social status, and accolades. I spent more time doing nothing like, literally, that’s what meditation is.

I began to realize how beautiful doing nothing makes me. It erases bags and wrinkles and improves facial structure and complexion. It also affects the actions I take, the things I bring into my space, and the energy I live in. It was all the accumulation of doing nothing.

If I continued on my overworked lifestyle, the bags under my eyes would only grow deeper and darker. I’d have to buy more products to counteract and cover up the damage my lifestyle created.

When I mentioned investing in your wellness in my post about cool eye pads, I really meant the doing nothing part. That investment alone will do wonders.

Below is a list of my very simple makeup bag.

Don’t get me wrong, it's fun to shop for skincare and makeup and spend time looking very pretty but not at the expense of secretly attacking my own face. When I looked in the mirror, all I saw was a list of things to fix and that just kept adding up.

As my primary goal is to maintain a healthy complexion, I want to replace powders because they dry out my skin. I’m currently shopping around for liquid eyeshadows that match my old favorite eyeshadow palette, the tarte amazonian clay palette. It may be over 10 years old at his point but I love the simplicity of it. It created this really nice shadowy look and if I’m able to find a liquid version that can blend just as nicely, I think that it would be a nice witchy touch to my collection.

Now when I shop for makeup, I’m way less desperate to fix things. I’m now more in tune with purchasing products that fit my standards of clean ingredients, cruelty-free, and those that are more likely to add fun to my life.

August 25th, 2024

Emily Kosciuk

eye makeup

Muscles of the Face

cool eye pads