The “smoky eyes” look refers to a variety of eye shadow styles that both make the eyes look more deeply set, and create a dark but soft frame around them. Darker skinned people already have naturally well defined eyes, so we don’t need to darken the eye socket so much as to create a soft, but deep frame for them. To do this, we should use artistic contrast.
Here are some examples of smoky eyes palettes suitable for darker skin.
For the person with a dark cool complexion, a glittery black adds a bit deeper shadow without looking sooty. This black should be somewhat sheer, but a quality brand of powder that you can use a watercolor technique to line the eyes.
Mildly metallic dark silver is a good median color, but for contrast, a lavender or somewhat rosy purple is best. What we’re going to do is to use the median color as the balance between them in some places, but the light purple will make the black look darker without having to add more eyeshadow.
For our how-to, we’re going to use medium-dark warm complexion as an example. With warm complexions, you want to stick with earthy, natural colors for the smoky eye look. Black and silvery colors end up looking far too flat. The basic steps are about the same for both cool and warm complexions though.
This article is from a site I used to write, DarkComplexions.com. It died due to lack of support. Since then, I’ve figured out ways to survive, and one is by combining a lot of sites that I once kept in separate topic domains. So I’ll be posting more of the content that used to be there on this one partly because even though there are now all of a sudden many sites about African and dark skinned women’s beauty, only a few are really speaking to us and our concerns. Some give bad or overly generic advice that doesn’t really reflect what we actually wear because they don’t really live around us or talk to us about the details. I realized that though maybe makeup isn’t the most important topic in the world, it is still worth honoring the beauty of my people by posting these things.
Ore Yeye Oshun!
Blessings and Ashe!