You are all dressed up ready to go and you look in the mir­ror. You reach for the eye shad­ow palette and you freeze. How do you know what colours to pick?Don't wor­ry, you are not alone. Every­day across the globe women are faced with what I call the eye shad­ow dilem­ma – what col­ors should I wear?Many women of­ten tell me that they don't mind wear­ing eye shad­ow but they are afraid be­cause they nev­er know what col­ors to put to­geth­er. So while I am not one to fol­low strict rules here are some guide­lines you can fol­low.

1. Pick your eye shad­ow based on eye colour. So for ex­am­ple peo­ple with blue eyes can use golds and brown. Peo­ple with green or hazel eyes can use colours like plums and pur­ple to make them pop. Brown eye girls are lucky in that they can use any shad­ow as most colours would look uni­ver­sal­ly flat­ter­ing.

2. Try nat­ur­al colours – that is use 3 col­ors shades of brown blend­ed well. Try the light­est col­or over en­tire lid (from lash line to brow), medi­um on low­er lid and dark­est col­or in the crease.

3. Take cues from the colour wheel and use com­pli­men­ta­ry colours or con­trast­ing col­ors. Us­ing this strat­e­gy you can wear colours next to each oth­er (com­ple­men­tary) or colours from op­po­site ends of colour spec­trum (Con­trast­ing). Col­ors that are op­po­site to each oth­er on the wheel of­ten con­trast and colours next to each oth­er com­ple­ment each oth­er. So for ex­am­ple you could wear sev­er­al shades of pur­ple or sev­er­al shades of blue or brown (com­pli­men­ta­ry) or pair a green and pur­ple (con­trast­ing).

4. Look to na­ture for in­spi­ra­tion. Take time out to stop and look at the flow­ers or a sun­set or a sun­rise. You will be sur­prised how our Cre­ator has solved many beau­ty prob­lems by putting colours to­geth­er for us in such a beau­ti­ful way.

5. Take a short­cut. All the cos­met­ic com­pa­nies have put to­geth­er colour com­bos in­to du­os (2 col­ors), trios (3 col­ors) or quads (4 col­ors) and have al­ready tak­en the guess work out of se­lect­ing com­pli­men­ta­ry or con­trast­ing colours. But be care­ful. If you get a quad you don't have to wear all 4 at the same time. Ex­per­i­ment and try­ing see­ing the ef­fects of us­ing just 1, 2 or 3 colours out of the com­bo.

6. Make sure your make­up kit has some ba­sic eye shad­ow col­ors (ei­ther in palette form or sin­gles). The most ver­sa­tile colours are

a. Black – good for lin­ing eyes and cre­at­ing a smoky eye

b. Cham­pagne – good for high­light­ing the brow bone or in­ner cor­ners

c. Brown – great for the crease. The dark­er you are, the rich­er the brown

d. Pur­ple – good mul­ti­pur­pose colour which can be used for a vari­a­tion of the tra­di­tion­al smoky eye

e. Char­coal Gray – when used light hand­ed is great for a day­time smokey look

f. Dark Blue/Navy – good with brown eyes and good for an­oth­er ver­sion of the smokey look