Best Way to Create Your Own Personal Style

We all have physical attributes that we can cultivate. Here’s how to maximise your positive points, play down your bad ones, turn your flaws into assets and create your own beauty trademark.

Create your individual beauty trademark

A modern beauty imperative is to flaunt some novel feature that makes you stand out from the crowd. It could be anything from the offbeat to the low-key: but it’s often the subtle changes that create the most impact. Nails are a mainstay beauty feature; paint them in a show-off shade, alternate the colours on each nail by using two or three different polishes, or decorate each with a flower or rhinestone. Hair is another useful tool: with colour, styling or, if it’s long, by adding accessories, your crowning glory can be transformed into an alluring trademark. For that pursued-by-the-paparazzi look, don a pair of fancy sunglasses. Alternatively, wear an unusual piece of jewellery, such as a choker or toe-ring.

From mehndi flowers for navels to face jewels, bindi dots, henna bracelets or little motifs for ankles, a great way of adding a stamp of individuality is to decorate a part of your body with elaborate body art. With Demi Moore, Madonna, Daryl Hanner, Sophie Dahl and many other celebrities sporting body art, it has become very a la mode. Create your own design or follow a pattern by using one of the temporary DIY kits which last several weeks, such as Temptu’s Ceremonial Body Art, Revlon’s Street-wear Art Pencil and Tattoo Sealer or Urban Decay’s Body Art Kit.

Discover your beauty trait

Beauty demands that you be yourself and express your individuality, so start by looking for a beauty trait that makes you both unique and striking. If it’s not obvious to you, ask your friends and partner. Study other people, as well as pictures of actresses and models, to try to identify what makes them special.

Here are a few suggestions regarding the characteristics that could become your personal beauty trait: a strong or delicate bone structure, your hair, smile, skin tone, a prominent or unusually shaped nose, long neck, a mole, freckles, large mouth, small lips, big eyes, deep-set eyes, hooded eyes, sparse or heavy eyebrows, a dimple.

You only have to glance at magazines to see how dozens of celebrities have made a beauty trait of a striking feature or even a so-called ‘imperfection’: think of Brook Shields’ heavy eyebrows; Belinda Carlisle’s dimples; Lauren Hutton’s gap between her teeth; Barbra Steisand, Angelica Huston and Sandra Bullock’s strong noses; Cindy Crawford’s mole; Charlotte Rampling’s hooded eyes; and Sigourney Weaver and Holly Hunter’s thin lips.

Whether it’s your most prized feature or a so-called ‘flaw’, make this characteristic a focal point and, wherever possible (you cannot exactly highlight a dimple), draw attention to it by playing it up, highlighting or defining it.