3 “How To” Make-Up Hacks

If your favorite lipstick breaks leaving you with no touch ups for your entire night out, you can’t recreate Adele’s perfect cat-eye for the love of money, or you’ve broken a nail just when they were all the same perfect length, don’t despair! These 3 super DIY makeup hacks can fix the most common debacles in no time.

How to Fix Broken Lipstick

A broken or melted lipstick bullet is one of the worst things, and, unless you have a lipstick mold, it’s pretty difficult to restore the product to perfect condition. However, with this trick you can still get a lot of wear out of your favorite shade.                                                                                      

1.      Spoon out the residual product with a knife, toothpick, or even a paper clip.

2.      Place all the lipstick you can recover in a microwave-safe bowl.

3.      Melt in a microwave for 10 seconds or until it’s completely liquefied.

4.      Pour the liquid into an empty lip-balm tube, allow to cool, and voilà — a repurposed broken lipstick.

 

How to Apply the Perfect Eye Liner

One of the hardest fundamentals of applying makeup is to master the art of the cat eye. You know how it is — you have to dash out and end up spending an hour steadily enlarging each cat eye wing as you try make it match the other until you look like you’ve been punched in the eyes. That’s why we all need some genius eyeliner hacks in our lives. Grab your cello tape and prepare for some serious flicking action and the perfect cat-eye:

1.      Take two pieces of good quality cello tape and affix them both around your eye at an angle to form a stencil in the shape of a cat eye. Then fill in the space between the tape as messily as you like.

2.      Peel off the tape. If it’s too messy, touch it up. If it’s way too messy, fix it with a great makeup remover pen. It effectively removes every trace of even the most stubborn eye makeup (and all makeup for that matter) in seconds.

 

How to Fix a Broken Nail

The key to the kingdom of perfect nails — and welcome compliments of “OMG are they real?” — are quite simply tea bag wraps. Yes, you probably have all the required materials at home for the weirdest but easiest nail repair secret ever!

1.      You crack a nail. Ow. Take a tea bag, cut off the top, and empty out the contents.

2.      Cut out a small, rectangular section of the bag that’s about the width and length of your nail. Rather make it longer if you’re uncertain and don’t cover your entire nail with the paper. Only cover it halfway if it’s a crack, and a third of the way if the tip is peeling or weak.

3.      Apply a high quality basecoat. While it’s still mostly wet, position the rectangle of tea bag so that it entirely covers the crack with room to spare underneath for extra strength. Note, nail glue does not work as cleanly and smoothly as base coat.

4.      Press the tea bag down with your fingers to make sure everything is smooth, without wrinkles or bubbles. It doesn’t matter if stuff gets a little messy at this stage. Let it dry, then shellac the entire thing down with another layer of basecoat.

5.      The tea bag will start to turn slightly transparent — this is what you want.

6.      If you wish, cut off some of the length. When everything’s dry, file away the paper overhang at the tip with a regular nail file. It’ll come right off.

7.      Take a superfine file and gently smooth the area where you just stuck the tea bag to blend the two parts. This gets rid of any lumps or bumps. Use a buffer to smooth and shine everything to finish.

8.      Apply another layer of basecoat and let it dry completely. If you run your finger over your nail now, you should feel nothing but a smooth surface. If it doesn’t feel totally smooth, just gently file the surface again and apply another base coat.

9.      It won’t look exactly like your regular nail, which is why you paint it nail polish as you normally would: 2-3 coats, followed by a topcoat (the best thing about teabag wraps is that the entire thing comes off with nail polish remover).

10.  When you’re done, you will literally see no difference between your repaired nail and the your natural nails. This is the beauty of tea bag wraps.  

 

It’s that easy. Now that you have the perfect pout, fabulous eyes, and seamless nails, gather up that tea and have a cuppa on us.

Skip to content