Your head feels like it’s been put in a grinder. You’ve been bent over a toilet bowl all day, seeing your meals in reverse. Your eyes look like you were the other guy in a back-alley scrap with Mohammed Ali, and you’re slumped over your desk cringing at all the embarrassing posts from last night. Ah, the apocalyptic joy of a hangover.
Look, we’ve all been there. But just because you’re feeling like death warmed up, doesn’t mean you need to look it, especially if you have an early morning presentation or lunch with your parents. Hang that hangover out to dry with either of these two, terrific routes to hiding the sins of last night.
From the land of sheet masks, BB creams and all manner of bonkers ingredients, comes another trend, apt for the Sleepless in the Subcontinent: hangover makeup. To be fair, this one showed up in 2015, but if you still spend your Mondays fitting the description above, you need not have qualms about carrying it along with you to 2017.
If you’re expecting a barrage of concealers, drink think again. Hangover makeup actually focuses on accentuating, not hiding last night's debauchery – that means bringing out puffy under-eyes (what the Koreans refer to as aego sal or ‘charming fat’) with contour cream, blush and smudged eyeliner.
Don’t want anyone to know you spent the weekend watching reruns with your cat? You can also fake puffy, youthful eyes (we kid you not) by drawing a half moon in the deepest crease of your under-eyes with contour cream, then dabbing with highlighter.
Are your under-eyes red? No problem! Korean kids just sweep them with blush, working to mask the redness and impart color at the same time.
Another alternative is some devil-may-care, smudged eyeliner – a step you can skip if you forgot to take your makeup off and really #WokeUpLikeThis.
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If you’re too traditional for crazy Korean makeup trends, there are more conservative ways to walk into work. The second route is to remove all evidence from the crime scene – this means altering your morning base routine with products that are a little more hangover-friendly.
Start with a DIY remedy: recruit the caffeine from green tea bags to soothe inflammation under the eyes, and run an ice cube all over your face to shrink swelling.
Rather than your regular concealer, use a color-correcting one to remove bruised blues and dull browns from under your eyes.
Next, forget foundation. Alcohol dries out the skin, so thick layers will come out looking patchy. Instead, use a sheer BB cream blended with a spot of highlighter to fake that hydrated, glowy face you left at the club last night.
Open up sleep-deprived eyes with flesh-colored eyeliner on the waterline, and restore your healthy flush with a swipe of blush, placed higher along the cheekbone (that way, it works additionally to mask darkness and swelling).
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