How to get a fresh, bright-eyed look

Professional makeup artist Katie Wedlund shows us how to get a fresh, bright-eyed look with minimal makeup. She shares some of her favorite products, many of which can be found at the drugstore. It's the perfect beauty routine for the low-maintenance girl on the go. 

• To start, wash your face in circular motions to exfoliate your skin.
• Immediately after washing your face, apply moisturizer.
• Then use a tweezer to clean up your brows for a more polished look.
• After you tweeze, you can use a wax brow fix pen to define the eyebrows without adding color.
• To get rid of the darker area under your eyes apply concealer.
• For additional coverage, lightly brush on a mineral sheer powder.
• To enhance your eyes, brush your lashes with a coating of lash primer and then use a heated eyelash curler to lift your lashes.
• You can stop after this step but if you desire an even fuller look add a few coats of mascara.
• Then, highlight the tear line of your lower eyelid with a white eyeliner pencil and swipe a luminescent cream across your eyelids.
• To finish off this look, simply rub on some pink blush balm to your cheeks, apply a coat of sheer lip gloss and you’re ready to go!

KATIE WEDLUND: Hi, I'm Katie Wedlund from howdini.com. Today I'm going to show you how to get fresh, bright-eyed, wide-awake look that's especially good for the low-maintenance girl who doesn't like to wear a lot of heavy makeup. And the best thing about this is most of the products I use you can find at your local drugstore.

So the first thing we're going to do to start off this look is wash your face, gently rubbing in circular motions, slightly exfoliating, giving Meredith here a nice little scrub to start her day. So immediately after that, you should moisturize. I love Complex 15. It's so light, it almost feels like water. It has no greasiness at all. Doesn't that feel nice?

All right, the next thing, that is so basic and simple, and once you do it, it lasts for days, and you look much more wide awake after, cleaning up the under-brow area. So I'm just going to go in and just pluck away a few loose hairs that Meredith has here. And so often we're taught not to pluck anything from the top of the brow, which is true when it comes to shaping. But every so often, you have these random stray hairs that maybe come off the edge or out to the side. And it's perfectly fine to pluck some of those away. It definitely helps to clean up your look and just give you a polished look without putting on any makeup.

Another really great trick to help open the eye area is this wonderful brow fixm which is basically a wax in a pencil. I love this. It's such a great way to define the eyebrows without adding color, without changing their shape permanently.

Another thing that most all of us experience is a little bit of darkness under our eyes. So simple concealer--one of my favorites is Physician's Formula Beauty Spiral, and I love it because it has a really nice moist, yet dry, texture. It's hard to describe, but it doesn't crease because it just kind of goes on dry, almost like a powder, but, yet, it doesn't dry the under-eye area either.

Now, one of my favorite sorts of coverage--light coverage--is the mineral sheers that are out there. I love the product--it's Neutrogena Mineral Sheers--because it does have a very, very slight sheen to it--nothing overboard. You can't really tell, but there's something about it that's very brightening. And it's so quick and easy, you could do it without a mirror. Meredith looks great; she could stop right here--go out on the town just like she is--fresh-faced and gorgeous.      

If she wanted to take it a little further, there are tricks like curling your eyelashes. This is one of my favorite tools of all. It's a heated eyelash curler. It's a brilliant tool. It heats up within moments--battery operated. But what I like to do before using the lash curler, I like to prime it. This MAKE UP FOR EVER Lash Fibers is a wonderful way to do that. It both lengthens and volumizes your lashes, and it primes it so that your heated curler actually works even better and faster--kind of similar to when you put mousse in your hair and then use a hot iron. It just takes to it much better and curls much faster. I'm coating both sides of the lashes, top and bottom. Then I take my eyelash curler, which is now heated up fully. Look straight ahead and a little bit lower. And I'm just going to come in--and it's a little warm--but I'm just going to come right in to the base of the lash and press--just for a couple seconds. And then you kind of cinch it out slowly, and your lashes completely scoop up as if you were born that way. So you can actually stop right there and have a natural-looking, curled lash. The white has actually kind of disappeared under the heat of the curler.

Or you could go one step further and apply a little bit of mascara. This Maybelline Full N' Soft is really light, and it just makes your lashes look fuller without giving them that spidery-looking, mascara-caked-on look. It's very light and just sort of fills out your lashes. So notice the difference between the two eyes. This side looks a little bit more popped open. And then we'll do the other eye just the same way. So she looks great with her newly curled and darkened lashes.

One other thing I'm going to do is just to go in with a little highlighter on the tear line. I've got this MAKE UP FOR EVER pencil, and I'm just going to get just the inner rim, barely--a little touch of it. So simple and easy, and just gives that extra added pop.

One final thing you could do with the eyes that is very quick and easy--it doesn't involve any fancy brushes or anything--is a simple palette like this, by Fresh. A nice luminescent cream that you can just swipe on with your finger tips. You can put it just on the brow bone, you can cover the whole eye area, whatever you'd like. And it just gives a little bit of a luminosity right beneath the brow bone.

One more thing that you can do really quick without a brush--easy swipe of the finger--is this Ink Pink Blushing Balm by Bliss. You can just swipe on a little bit of color just right on your cheek. Make it look like you've been hanging out in the sun all day.

And then, final step of all: a little lip balm, again with the fingertips. This one by L'Oreal is called Jelly Balm. It's got this great sort-of tangerine tint to it. Again, something you can just quickly swipe on.

And doesn't she look wonderful and fresh and bright-eyed? It doesn't look like she's wearing a lot of makeup, but yet she's got this glow about her, and nobody knows that she just woke up and rolled out of bed.

I'm Katie Wedlund for howdini.com.