As you get older, you need to change your products, and how you apply your make-up.

Because you’ve made it to 40, and you know a lot more about life than you did when you were 20.

You also know that you can’t keep doing things the way you’ve always done them. This applies to life… and make-up.

Your changing face and skin may need new products and techniques to make sure that your make-up is enhancing your features – and not making you look older.

Here are make-up tips for women over 40.

Take note of your new facial contours

Between our mid to late 30s, as women, our facial contours change. We lose volume, yes, but with that we gain definition and structure – making 40s the most beautiful decade for a lot of women I know.

Familiarise yourself with your facial contours, and adapt and adjust the way you apply your products – especially blush – accordingly. As most women’s features become more defined in their 40s, it’s wise to play around with both colours and techniques.

Colourwise, you can either try something brighter or softer – the world is your oyster. As for application technique, ensure that you focus on the apples of your cheeks to accentuate your bone structure without making your face look hard. You probably don’t need to sweep blush upwards and outwards anymore, and instead, you should make sure you’re applying it high enough to give your features a lift.

Highlight wisely

Highlighter can do great things for your features, but it can just as easily take a turn for the worse when used irresponsibly.

A highlighter is traditionally used on areas you want to attract attention to. It’s the age-old concept of shade and light, and the reflective nature of the product creates the illusion of bringing the highlighted area to the front, or ‘lifting’ it.

Highlighter fails when it is applied to the skin with an uneven texture of any kind – which is kind of unfair, to be honest, because we can benefit from it most when our skin texture starts becoming uneven.

If you apply highlighter over fine lines, enlarged pores, or sagging skin, it acts as a gigantic magnifying glass to draw attention to these imperfections. It’s a cruel, cruel world.

Take a class…

…Or ask three different friends to do your make-up.

The reason for this is twofold, with the first being that we’re creatures of habit – it’s our nature. If you’ve been doing your make-up on autopilot for the past 10 years, there’s probably something you could be doing in a better, easier, simpler or more flattering way.

The second reason for this is that because we’re creatures of habit, we often unknowingly adopt bad habits (in life and in a make-up application). Go ahead and read the above paragraph again.

By taking a class and getting some recommendations from either a professional or three people who you think seem to know what they’re doing, you’re opening yourself up to seeing how other people do things and what they use to do it.

Don’t be afraid to make a mistake

You won’t know what works or doesn’t work until you try! So give yourself some time and experiment – just make sure you don’t do it just before a big event.