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No one app will do it all.
First, dealing with the appearance. If you wear glasses, take them off now. Holding the phone above eye level (high angles, everyone!) we snap the base image.
I’ve paid for a month or so of the Pro option in FaceApp, but you really don’t have to for our use.
Hit Gallery, a button in the bottom row in the middle; The app will want access to your photos. Some people worry that FaceApp is being used to strip mine faces for Facial Recognition, but we’ve clearly decided we don’t mind giving them a photo or two from our camera photo stream.
Choose the photo you want to process, and hit the Gender button that appears under it. This is a free option, and probably the feature we’re most interested it. Your choices at this point are Female, Female 2, Masculine. I use Female 2, as she seems to have better hair.
Then hit save (in the upper right.) Hit X and then hit cancel, left ^, and gallery again. Select the most recent shot on your photo stream, the image you just gender swapped. Now that row of functions below the image will show feminine line views of faces.
Actually, now is probably time to clean up the brows. Close FaceApp, open iBrows.app. Use the import button to get the clean Gender swap image you just saved.
Then hit the button to the right of import, which is Sculpt/shade/fill/color. Select sculpt. A row of schematic brows appears. Choose one and use the sliders on the image to adjust it.
(Turn Sculpting Intensity WAY down, unless you’re a super model)
Fill and color the brows, and save to photos, and then back to FaceApp.
I usually add the glasses then, in FaceApp
That’s my overbearing, sometimes winged brows dealt with to a better female aesthetic. If I had my way, next, I’d lay a line of highlight down the center of my nose, and darken the flaring flesh that houses my nostrils in an attempt to thin the nose a bit. I could use a rhinoplasty app, but except for the initial gender swap, I don’t use apps that scale horizontally or vertically, wanting to see what color and shade can do without surgery.
Now you can play with the makeup and Hair style. The lip color only really shows up in the Darker more intense treatments. For lip color and lip lining, maybe Perfect365.app is a better choice.
And that brings us to the great question: what foundation and contouring color should I be using? That question alone has halted a dozen lightning raids on the Walgreens cosmetics section. Sure, I could ask, at the cost of admitting to someone what I was up to.
My latest attempt is an app called ColourMatch by Microskin. Scanning first a blank sheet of clean paper, it attempts to get your skin color, corrected for local lighting.
Ok, using the front camera (whose sensitivity might vary from the back camera we used to measure the lighting, but oh, well…), we get matched to 09 rose Beige.
Which, if we live in 9 cities around the world with MicroSkin stores would be it. But we don’t
That’s THEIR line of foundations, but using an app called swatches.app and screen captures, you can get the RGB values of the foundation and look for matches in a more accessible line.
we find that Microskin #09 rose beige is Pancho Gray, (237, 203,173) in RGB, #EDCBAD in HTML, And 726 U in Pantone.
Looking at the Wet ’n Wild Photo Focus Stick foundations (a probably cheaper option than Mehron)
Microskin #09 rose beige is Pancho Gray, (237, 203,173) in RGB, #EDCBAD in HTML, And 726 U in Pantone.
I’ve also had ColourMatch hand me #10 Golden Beige
#10 Golden beige is Calico Yellow (230, 195, 146), #E6C392, 7508 C. Wet n wild Shell Ivory is a good match for #10 (Gold Sand (orange) (232, 189, 146), #E8BD92, 720 C) (232v vs 230, 195 vs 189 in green, and exact match in blue.
The best match in Wet n Wild photo focus stick for #09 Rose Beige (237, 203, 173) is probably Vanilla Beige (219,175,130). The human eye is most sensitive in the green area of the spectrum, so that's probably what needs to be the closest.
I like the hair color that FaceApp used for me in Female2, but I don’t trust my color vision (muted by defective genetics and male upbringing), so I use Swatches.app, to get the colors (the hair is highlighted, so get the light and dark colors), and then go to a wig website, and measure those in their color samples, and we’ve evolved a technique to avoid vendor lock-in.
Then, finally, let me recommend a video. Many makeup videos emphasize the tools and precision of application. None of that here; initial application is from greasepaint sticks by hand, in rapid strokes and sweeps, clearly concerned with the areas hit, but not in detail. Watching it I was immediately tempted to follow along (which I could not, being in a circumstance utterly without privacy at the moment.)
He uses Golden tan and Golden honey, from wet n wild, at
https://www.wetnwildbeauty.com/photo-focus-stick-foundation....
Golden Honey (219, 171,106), #DBAB6A, 7509 C.
Golden Tan (181, 141, 101), #B58D65, 2317 C.
Now perhaps you are not hesitant about talking to the on duty expert and don’t need this, fine. I only know what my generation needed, and needed to overcome the constant fear of “doing it wrong”.
There IS no wrong, but we mostly don’t realize that. we immediately want to be a pro, passing over the apprentice and journeyman stages.
In my case this was exacerbated by defective color vision; not full blown color blindness, but a difficulty telling some colors apart.
And as for the clerks, they are there th help inexperienced shoppers, which you probably qualify as. They mostly don’t care what your reasons are for shopping, and even if you run into a zealot that wants to call what you are doing sick and wrong, that will be verbal, and you are free to leave the store, and (being at work), they are not.
If the key to mastery is practice, then anything that encourages time spent in practice is extremely valuable.
Comments
Some really nice advice
Thanks for putting this together. I'll be using it to start some research.
Your friend
Crash
Thank you for taking the time
Thank you for taking the time and effort to compile all this -
Dee
Donna
It just bothers me, with my
It just bothers me, with my color problems that the one bottle of foundation I have from my two makeovers is in a tiny proprietary brand that cannot be readily matched by quickly running into Walgreens or Ulta, so as not to attract attention...
Lynda Shermer
Note the improved brows on
Note the improved brows on these, as well as the lip colorI’m not sure why faceapp changed the hair color; of the two, I prefer the first hair
Lynda Shermer
If you pick the WRONG app...
"I'm here live... It's not... I'm not a cat!"