When you a darker brunette and have pale skin like I do, it can

In the halls of old craft, the elders taught that beauty is the daughter of light and shadow. So when Olivia Wilde counsels that those with darker brunette hair and pale skin may feel the face “wash you out,” and that learning to contour and daring a little bold eye makeup and dark wine colors upon the lips can restore presence, she speaks an ancient grammar with modern tools. Cosmetics are not disguise but dialogue: they bid the light to praise the bone and the shadow to bless the curve. To paint the face is to compose a small sunrise where features wake, each in turn.

The wisdom hides in her sequence. First, learning to contour—to place shade where nature already whispers it: beneath the cheekbone, along the temple, under the jaw’s shoreline. Contour is the carver’s art in gentle measure; it returns architecture to a visage that strong contrast can flatten. On pale skin, deep hair can pull the eye outward; thoughtful shadow pulls the gaze back to center, where expression lives. Thus the face becomes a room with good lanterns, not a wall struck by noon.

Next comes the call to be bold with eye makeup—to define your eyes with line and depth so the story-tellers of the face can speak across a room. Here liner is a reed pen, mascara a dark thread; they frame the glance like script on parchment. A touch of shimmer at the inner corner, a quiet contour in the socket—these are not theatrics, but emphasis, the way a scribe enlarges the initial letter to guide the reader home. When hair is night and skin is dawn, the eyes must be the stars that reconcile them.

Then, the benediction of lip colors—especially dark wine colors—to anchor the composition. A mouth in berry or claret can steady a pale canvas the way a seal anchors a letter. It carries warmth into a cool field, authority into gentleness. This is not severity; it is cadence. The lip speaks in tempo: nude for whisper, rose for conversation, wine for declaration. The right shade does not shout; it gathers the face and says, “Attend.”

Hear a tale from the playhouses of another age. When gaslight first entered the theatre, many actresses found that their features vanished into glare; faces indeed were “washed out.” They learned greasepaint like a second literacy—subtle hollows, careful highlights, defined eyes, weighted mouths—so that the audience could read emotion from balcony to pit. Sarah Bernhardt, it is said, painted with a sculptor’s understanding of bone; even across a sea of air, her glance held. What those stages discovered, Wilde recasts for the street: light is merciless unless befriended; paint is friendship with light.

The ancients would counsel humility with boldness. Technique without listening hardens into mask; bold color without balance becomes blare. But intention married to measure becomes grace. Ask the mirror not “Am I improved?” but “Is the person more visible?” Let the hand serve the spirit. In this way, cosmetics become ceremony: anointing for the day’s labor, not merely ornament for the gaze of others.

From her saying, take a clear lesson and a simple practice. First, map your face: in soft daylight, note where shadow naturally falls; let contour echo only what already exists. Second, pick one focal point—eyes or lips—and grant it the bolder voice. Third, if you carry darker brunette and pale skin, build a bridge of warmth: a faint veil of peach or rose at the cheek, a lineage of berry at the mouth. Fourth, test under different lights—window, lamp, street—because truth changes with the sun. Finally, remember the oldest rule: let the art reveal, not replace. Paint until you recognize yourself more clearly, then set the brush down. In such restraint is radiance; in such radiance, the world reads you rightly.