Cross Dressing Makeup and Style Tips for Light to Medium Dark Brown Hair and Fair to Medium skin:

Lips: Brunettes should avoid light lip color because it can make you look washed out. Use a range of rich colors like plums, reds, warm or muted mauvey pinks. Look for dark, rich colors, like black or chocolate browns. Always use a lipliner to shape lips beautifully and keep lipstick from bleeding. Match the liner to the same shade of your lipstick or just a tiny bit darker. Add and blend in a bit of concealer tint around the edges of the lips to create a more defined lip line. For a little sparkle try our Luminous Lips lip lacquer to seal your lipstick and give lips a moist, plumper appearance.

Foundation: Click here for a basic step by step guide to applying a flawless foundation.

Skin tone: Beauties with brown hair and fair to medium skin tone are lucky. They can use a range of blushes, from pinkish browns to warmer colors like dusty rose. Color will help liven up medium-toned skin. For lighter medium-toned skin, pinks and pinkish browns work. For a medium skin that is a little darker, a warmer tomato red or dusty rose color will brighten the look.

"Lipstick is to the face what punctuation is to a sentence." -Diane Von Furstenberg.

Lip shades that look great with Medium to dark brown hair: Porsche Red, Matador Red, Rustique, Raison, Dune Rose, Rum Raison, Scarlet, Desert Blossom, Eruption, Mulberry, Rouge, Sheer Power, Cafe

Eyes: Define eyes at the outer corners with a dark chocolate brown eyeliner/smudger pencil at the base of the upper lashes. Move in a thinner line center of the lid. Then smudge the line evenly until it has no hard edges. Add darkness to the base of the upper lid tends to visually give the eye a lift. Add dots of pencil just at the base of the lower lashes. Try a subtle wash of Silver Brown over the lids. For eyes with more depth, apply a dusting of deep Navajo brown shadow to eyelids with more emphasis on the outer 1/4 of the lid and crease.

To remove eye makeup, always start with one eye at a time. Close one eye and look with the other. Cleanse the first eye completely before you begin the second one. Apply tgCosmetics eye makeup remover to a cotton pad. Wipe the pad from the brow downward over your closed lid to the base of you lashes. Repeat several times until the entire lid is clean.

For full, pouty lips:
Dab a bit of concealer tint all around the edges of the lips and blend in. Line the lips right on the very edges with a burgundy or mocha pencil, then fill in the entire lip area with the lip liner pencil. (See our Featured Makeover page to see how this is done). Apply lipstick, dust lips lightly with translucent loose powder, then apply a second coat. Finish with our Luminous Lips Lip Lacquer to get the puckered, pouty effect. Keeping lips smooth is important and this can be done by exfoliating lips by brushing them with a toothbrush and using a lip balm or moisturizer to keep them soft.

Cross Dressing Style Tips

Dark hair and fair skin tone look great in black, cool grays, steely bronzes, white, bright red as well as tomato reds. Intense blues, periwinkles and shades of teal are great colors to try.
For evenings at home, silk pajamas or silk lounging pants give one the sensation of opulence and sensuality. Light a vanilla candle and soak in a bath of scented sea salts.

When going out, accessorize with cultured sophistication. The hand held clutch bag is the most feminine and defines mood and occasion. Most clutch bags include a thin strap that can be tucked in side or worn on the shoulder. Know where to subtract. Never overstuff it with cosmetics.

A choker of diamonds or rhinestones for special evenings make a great glamour look. A simple, dark outfit with striking jewelry accents always looks great.

Glamour queens have always sported a narrow waist. This is sometimes a problem for crosdressers and drag queen. Girdles and layered clothing like jackets, waistless dresses and shirttails worn outside skirts and slacks are good solutions. If you want to make more drastic adjustments, a clinical professor of plastic and re-constructive surgery at Georgetown University, has devised a waist-narrowing operation that is done in conjunction with liposuction or an abdominoplasty. The doctor weaves long pieces of threadlike absorbable suture through the lower layers of the skin covering the abdominal muscles, then from just above the navel to the sides of the waist and down to above the pubic area. As the ends of this triangular suturing are gently tugged, the waistline is drawn in one to two inches.