Anastasia Beverly Hills' New Launch Encourages Contouring For Beginners

While professional makeup artists and TikTok beauty gurus make it look simple, contouring can be intimidating to the everyday consumer. From differentiating between cool, sculpting shades and warm, bronzing shades, to ensuring a formula blends seamlessly, and applying lines in all the right places, a person's expertly contoured face can be as confusing as a map. That's why Anastasia Beverly Hills wants to change the perspective on the skill, and encourage contouring for beginners. Meet the Smooth Blur Contour Stick ($32), a prestige sculpt stick for newbies in four shades.

With luxury packaging and a buildable, blendable formula, the brand's four new shade sticks were formulated with the intention to avoid streaks and patchiness. ABH's president Claudia Soare says what makes the formula unique is its gel-like texture. "It dries down matte, as opposed to semi-matte and tacky, as commonly seen with a gel texture," she says.

ABH is no stranger to contour, having been a staple at the height of the full-glam YouTube era in the mid-2010s. A decade later, however, makeup artists and the everyday consumer are leaning into the " approachable makeup " aesthetic, a slightly more done-up spin on no-makeup makeup .

This is something Ariel Tejada (Makeup By Ariel) touched on when he soft-launched the new contour sticks last week. Kylie Jenner's longtime makeup artist hosted a private masterclass for a select group of makeup artists and content creators at the ABH headquarters in Los Angeles, where he showed attendees how to integrate the sticks with the brand's new Blurring Second-Skin Matte Foundation.

Reflecting on the ABH's contour launches from the past, which first kicked off in 2014 (including contour powder kits, cream kits and contour sticks), Soare calls the new release "an innovation in our offering with an updated formula to bring the best of contouring application to the forefront."

Offering her own input, she says you only need a small amount of product, which is applied to areas you want to minimize and sculpt. She suggests hollows of the cheek, temples, jawline, sides of the nose, and under the tip of the nose. She raves that the gel-like formula makes it easy to blend with either a brush, sponge or fingertips. If you need a visual tutorial, the brand's TikTok feed should do the trick.

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