I tried leg contouring to see if it was as ridiculous as it seems

I’m sure everyone is very much familiar with the concept of contouring by now; if you’re not, then it’s a make up technique designed to enhance your bone structure using dark and light tones.

Contouring has become a bit of a craze lately, and leg contouring is it’s newest form. The internet is filled with videos where make up experts are teaching us how to use the technique to give the illusion of having bronzed, toned legs.

It looks a bit ridiculous, but claims to make your legs look longer, slimmer and more toned. I decided to try it out for myself to see if it was worth the hassle, and here’s how it went.

Step one: colour yourself in

To get that desired toning I used a dark shade down either side of my leg and around my knee, and filled in the blanks with highlighter (just in case that wasn’t obvious). After 10 minutes of far too much bending over, my unblended leg looked slightly ridiculous. It looked like a butcher had chalked me up.

Step two: blend it out

Halfway through the process I was pleasantly surprised to see a prominent difference between my contoured leg (left) and my natural skin (right). Something I really liked was that the multiple scars on my knee were covered up, and my whole leg just looked smoothed over, if not a little waxy.

Step three: remember to do the backs

This is very important to remember – if it hadn’t been for the Youtube tutorial I would’ve walked away with half blended, two-toned legs. A key issue here is that it actually takes two people – I had to recruit my sister to fill in the backs of my knees and blend in my calves (it’s not natural to bend that far).

One of the major downsides was that I used up the only two shades I actually matched in my contouring palette. How will I function without my colour corrector? If you’ve got enough money to buy a new contouring palette every time you want to do this then go for it, otherwise it’s just cheaper to just buy some fake tan.

The whole process took me just over an hour, which seemed like a ridiculous waste of time to me as someone who only takes roughly half an hour to get ready for a night out.

Personally, I think that if you wanted more toned-looking legs then you could actually use that hour to go for a run and put on a bit of tan instead. Yes, you wouldn’t get the same immediate results as you do with contouring, but this solution has more longevity, in that you would actually get toned legs instead of faux ones. I don’t want to sound like a bitch here, but if you can spare an hour to apply make up to your legs on a daily basis then you need to get out more.

I took my contoured legs out on a test run for the day to see if anyone would notice or look twice at them. A few people thought I was wearing tights because they looked so matte, but nobody seemed to think my legs looked any more buffed than usual. Where usually I don’t really care about what people think my legs look like, I found myself feeling quite indignant that nobody had complimented my meticulous artwork.

When sat down I was constantly avoiding putting things on my lap or crossing my legs, for fear of rubbing off my painstakingly painted legs. On closer inspection the make up was quite obvious and made any hairs I’d missed with the razor look even more prominent, so it actually led to me feeling much more self conscious than I would do usually.

When the always unreliable British weather decided to take a turn for the worse, I worried that my legs were starting to look streaky with the rain. Although everyone assured me that they looked fine, I felt more self-conscious about my legs than ever and was convinced people were looking.

Having said that, the technical concept of it worked for me, so if you have the time and resources then it’s a great idea for events and nights out if you want your pins to look fab in all the photos. It was also really handy for covering up scars, so if you’re self conscious about things like this then definitely consider just using the colour corrector on the problem area.

Overall, I don’t think this regime is worth doing every day. I don’t think anybody else cares that much about what your legs look like, so if I’m honest I felt a little narcissistic. In the end this backfired into making me feel more self conscious than ever. Although this is a relatively new craze, it feels very outdated for the supposedly body-appreciating 2016. I feel like young men and women have enough to cope with without being told they need to worry about what their legs look like, it’s definitely not something I’d ever considered before on such a serious level. The image this encourages you to put out there is just a false version of yourself, so I don’t understand why this is being endorsed on such a large scale when we should be encouraging young men and women to accept and love their bodies.

@CharleyRhiannon