What Is Strobing?

Half of you will sit here and praise baby jesus that you finally have a post telling you how to ‘strobe your face’ and the other half are going to be like, duh. How does one strobe their face? WTF is strobing?… you ask. Well so did I. So let’s take a few minutes to talk about the elephant in the beauty land room. Strobing. Birchbox calls it, “the new, all-natural contouring”, a less intense (and less time-intensive) way to highlight your face… PopSugar calls it, “the brilliant new face-sculpting hack for lazy girls”. You know what Ange calls it? HIGHLIGHTING. It’s as simple as that. It’s highlighting your face without the contour. Strobing focuses solely on highlighter, and you’re skipping the chiseled out contour of the past, applying your “strobing” products where the light would naturally hit your face.

Just putting some shiny emphasis on the parts of your face you want to shine like the top of the chrysler building. So if you just learned how to contour, I’m sorry but here is another new (read: old) thing for you to add to your list. But whatever. What do I know. Someone somewhere decided to give it a new name (read: old name, MAC did this in the 90s) and here we are. My inbox and Pinterest are full of people asking me WTF is strobing, so instead of sticking to my #stoptryingtomakestrobehappen happy place (I still won’t say or use the word fleek), I figured what the hell. Give the people what they want. But let me just tell you, it’s highlighters, you want the highlighters so you can strobe your face. Or highlight it like us non rebels will continue to call it. Because it’s the same damn thing.  And I guess for what it’s worth, a whole post dedicated to strobing or highlighting is fun, because it’s way less time consuming then painting a contour on your face and blending for days. And I LOVE me some highlighters and illuminators.  This allows you have a nice dewy glow. But make sure it’s natural, don’t get carried away, friends. Like I said above, apply it to the places the light will naturally hit your face (so, your cheekbones, brow bones, inner corner of your eyes, the center of your forehead, down your nose, and on your cupids bow.) So now that you know what strobing is and how to do it, let’s chat what products to use. Here are my favorites!

ELF BAKED HIGHLIGHTER  ||  MAC STROBE CREAM (thanks to Phyrra for this rec!)  ||  BENEFIT HIGH BROW ELF SHIMMER PALETTE  ||  NARS ALBATROSS  ||  GLOW TOP SHOP  ||  ELF SHIMMERING FACIAL WHIP LOREAL MAGIC LUMI  ||  NO 7 INTENSE RADIANCE  ||  DREAM LUMI  ||  MAGIC LUMI  ||  WHAT’S UP  ||  NYX BORN TO GLOW

So let me know, will you be calling it STROBING or HIGHLIGHTING?