5 Fun Makeup Tips for School

Create confidence, express yourself, and have a good time by doing fun makeup for school. Below are five fun makeup tips and trends to try, all of which can be easily adapted for age, skin color and type, the annoying patriarchy of dress codes, or whatever else comes your way.

1. Bold Blush

Purple, orange, black. Push the standard pinks, reds, and browns out of the way and embrace this trend, which exploded on the scene last year and is still going strong.

Makeup TikTok loooooves purple and orange, but I’m obsessed with black blush. The magic is in color-changing pigment that, instead of going on like onyx, changes to a deep berry or pleasant pink, depending on your skin tone.

What’s great about black blush is that you can just do statement blush and then get to bio lab at a godawful time of the morning. Look cute, feel cute, spend as little time as possible making cute. What’s tricky about black blush is hunting down one that is both vegan *and* cruelty-free (yep, they’re different things). I found some that were cruelty-free—meaning none of the components was tested on animals—or made without synthetic dyes, fragrances, parabens, phthalates, and ethically- sourced components but none that were also vegan.

Most cream makeup of any kind contains beeswax and/or lanolin, two of the most used non-vegan ingredients in makeup. Vegan makeup companies, please start making the color-changing black blush of our dreams!

2. Nude Lips

Anyone who was in middle or high school in the 90s remembers someone (usually several someones) lining their lips with brown eye pencil and then putting clear lip gloss on top of it. Your mom remembers, I promise.

Thankfully, the style has updated and upgraded in the time since. We’ll call this a 90s throwback, because you’ll still grab a pencil darker than your skin tone for those lip lines, and yes, that *could* be a brown eyeliner. But! You’ll then layer a neutral, matte lipstick over the top for both an on-trend look and a powerful pout.

The darker color of the pencil helps keep you from looking “washed out” with the addition of the nude lip color. You can also try layering two different lipsticks on top of each other, as the Dubai-based makeup artist Hindash shows here.

Tip: Go darker when lining the bottom lip but keep it softer in the cupid’s bow—the divet between the two peaks that make up your top lip. This will create strong definition and shape and avoid a look that’s overdone.

3. Graphic Eyeliner

Graphic eyeliner is simple to do and might make you feel like you’ve just unlocked a new beauty badge. It’s easiest to pick a cream stick (sometimes labeled as “soft pencil”) or liquid in a saturated color. Line the upper lid along the lash line and then draw a line in the eyelid crease from the middle of the eye outward. You then connect the two lines. I love the blue that beauty influencer and makeup artist Kristen Marie helped her 15-year-old daughter do for homecoming.

Try: ATHR Beauty Moonlight Crystal Palette
With a little water, you can turn some of these gem-colored powders into a creamier paste. Use an angled brush with stiff bristles and you’re on your way to a graphic eyeliner look that’s clean beauty perfection.

Another tip from TikTok is this “cheat” that really is just a slightly different technique. Use liquid eyeliner to make a triangle before connecting it to the outside edge of the upper eyelid and then filling it in to make wings. You can combine the two by using a bright blue, purple, green, or gold liquid liner to mix graphic eyeliner and winged eyeliner for max impact.

Try: 100% Pure Creamy Long Last Liner in Blackest
This is the perfect liner to practice stretching your wings. Get it? Sorry! Hi, I’m the problem, it’s me. No more dad jokes from here on out, I promise.

4. Neon Eyeshadows

I am HERE for the DayGlo style. I love color but have always used it with gusto on my lips and occasionally on my eyes. All those palettes with neon hues are like makeup candy! Nom nom. I love how makeup TikToker Molly Jack illustrates an excellent execution of this trend by starting with concealer around the eye space to create a primer before laying on the good stuff.

Try: Juvia’s Place Zulu Eye Shadow Palette
Hello, beauty. The price is right (just over $2 a color?!) on this palette full of punchy pigments, all cruelty-free, vegan, and made of ingredients considered good or low risk by the EWG. As a bonus, the company is woman-owned, Black-owned and led, and one of their guiding tenets is inclusivity for men, women, neither, both, as well as complexions of all shades.

Tip: Start with a cream base and alternate between cream eyeshadow, powder, cream, and powder to build a stay-put shadow in your preferred power color.

5. No Brow Meets Wow

Ok this one is for when you have a LOT of time and want to get hella creative. Block out your brows using layers of makeup—no bleaching here, thanks— and then use the entire eye space as your canvas.

We like this one not only for artistry, like this babe shows, but also going bigger and bolder with gradient eye shadow, spirit week, using makeup to dismantle oppression at protests, having fun at Pride… like really, if you put in the time to get rid of your brows, make it count, right?!

Final Thoughts

Makeup is meant for fully expressing ourselves and having fun. That means exploring which of these feels fun for you. With such bold choices (looking at you turning no brow into art), you’ll likely want to do one at a time. That said, it’s super easy to combine any of these with the nude lip look. Ahem, have I been doing black blush and nude lips for weeks now? Yes, yes I have.

It can be tricky to find makeup that meets the trifecta of vegan, cruelty-free, and clean, but have no fear, that’s why Kinder Beauty is here.

Please note: A product appearing in our blog is not an official Kinder Beauty endorsement. While every product we feature in an article is cruelty-free and vegan, these products do not necessarily meet all of our strict brand standards for curation in one of our boxes.

Leah M. Charney (she/her) is sassy yet classy and is always seeking a beauty routine to match. She delights in both the science and aesthetics of the clean beauty movement.