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Using Hair Styles to Make The Most of What You Have

I don’t talk often enough about maximizing your physical attributes and the opposite, hiding your less attractive physical characteristics. It is all about creating optical illusions. Making those highlights of your face jump right out and grab the visual attention in some subtle ways. The Hollywood visual effects folks can’t hold a candle to a great hairstylist and a makeup artist when it comes time to create an optical illusion.

“neon flashing arrows saying “Look at my eyes”

Lets look at a classic example . . . the picture above of Sophia Loren shows what can be done when you get good at this stuff. Sophia Loren has a couple of less than idea facial features, she is stuck with a quite large forehead and a chin that is a little on the weak side. As you can see the strategy that the hair stylist and make up artist decided upon was to downplay the defects with both a hiding strategy and a visual redirection.

The plan was for you not to notice the weak chin, but to visually be redirected to another area of the face, in this case her drop dead gorgeous eyes. Look at the cut how everything points to the eyes. Its almost like she is walking around with big neon flashing arrows saying “Look at my eyes”. Couple the great hair cut with some masterful makeup and there you have it. In the process the used bangs to hide the forehead, we get one of the most beautiful women to grace the planet.

One of the most successful tricks you can have in your arsenal is using redirection to visually bring focus to your strongest facial feature is with length termination. Wherever the style ends will be a natural visual focus on the plane of your face. So for an example, if you have great eyes, go short . . . above the ears. If your eyes are so, so but your nose is great, then terminate your style at earlobe level. Where your style ends is where the visual focus will be.

You won’t see very many pictures of Barbara Streisand with short style or a style with her ears showing for example, I wonder why?

Start paying attention to celebrities and really start to notice visual redirection or hiding schemes, you’ll see them all over the place. The beauty and style section of Oprah’s web site has a nice piece on five different examples of visual redirection. It is a great place to see my advice in action.

Read the entire article, The Right Cut for Your Face

I’ve written an article on how to avoid making poor choices when choosing a new hairstyle that you might want to check out What Should I do with my Hair?

Got a question, war story or comment about this topic? Click on the "Leave Your Comments" link at the very bottom of this article. Some of my best ideas for future articles come from reading reader comments. I'd love to hear from you!

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