Highlighter makeup can be applied to the face or other parts of the body to give a greater perception of angles and depth. It works by reflecting light and is often used for helping foundation look more natural. Typically, it’s used on the highest points of your face or other areas that you want to pop.
If you’re new to shopping for highlighter makeup, or even makeup in general, our reviews of the best highlighter makeup of 2025 can steer you in the right direction. We especially like the L’Oreal Paris Lumi Glotion for its hydrating formula that provides a natural glow. All of the products on our list are long-lasting, high-quality, stunning, and sure to take your makeup game to the next level.
The L’Oréal Paris True Match Lumi Glotion is a must-have addition to your beauty routine if you’re aiming for a subtle, natural glow. This highlighter makeup has been a viral favorite on TikTok, earning rave reviews for its gentle, light-reflecting formula infused with glycerin and shea butter. This combination ensures instant skin hydration while delivering a radiant finish that enhances your natural glow, effortlessly defining your angles.
With four available shades, this highlighter makeup caters to various skin tones, ensuring a perfect match every time. It’s lightweight and provides an illuminating color tint that makes your skin look healthy and vibrant all day. Suitable for both face and body application, it helps you achieve a natural glowing look without the fuss. The highlighter’s moisturizing properties from shea butter coupled with the hydration from glycerin make it an excellent choice for those wanting a dual-action product that both enhances and cares for their skin. This formula tops our list because it truly shows your angles and brings out your best natural glow.
The Wet n Wild Mega Glo highlighter makeup is a must-have for achieving a luminous glow. Its pressed powder formula boasts a buttery, buildable texture that melts effortlessly onto the skin, offering a weightless feel and seamless blending for a flawless finish. Enriched with micro-fine pearls, this highlighter creates a captivating, multi-dimensional effect that catches the light beautifully. Additionally, it nourishes the skin with the inclusion of Vitamin E, murumuru seed butter, shea butter, and argan oil, enhancing both your glow and skin health.
This highlighter makeup helps you put your best face forward, ensuring you’re photo-ready for any occasion. As a brand committed to ethical beauty, Wet n Wild proudly maintains a 100% cruelty-free stance and offers a variety of vegan makeup and tools, including foundation, nail polish, contour palettes, lipstick, and makeup brushes. It also celebrates diversity and inclusivity, catering to beauty lovers of all ages, ethnicities, skin tones, and economic backgrounds. No matter your stage in life, this product can meet your beauty needs.
Get glowing with the Physicians Formula highlighter makeup, designed to help you achieve a radiant, luminous look. Perfect for strobing or sculpting with contour, this highlighter can be applied over foundation or worn alone. Simply sweep it onto the high points of your face to catch the light and reveal your inner glow. The product’s luxurious cream-to-powder finish, combined with ultra-refined, soft focus pigments, ensures a flawless application every time. This brand’s product line includes highlighters, bronzers, and blushes, all crafted with nutrient-rich murumuru butter, cupuaçu butter, and tucuma butter.
These ingredients provide a silky texture and rich hydration, resulting in a healthy, natural glow. Committed to healthy beauty, this highlighter makeup is hypoallergenic and safe for sensitive skin and eyes. It’s formulated without over 150 known harsh ingredients, ensuring that your beauty routine is gentle and kind to your skin. The highlighter’s long-wearing, finely-pressed cream-to-powder formula boasts a unique bouncy texture that melts into the skin, offering the creamiest, most beautiful highlighted finish. Experience the blend of luxury and efficacy with this highlighter makeup, and enjoy a gorgeous, healthy glow that lasts all day.
The NYX Professional Wonder Stick is the ultimate dynamic duo for highlight and contour. Featuring a creamy, blendable highlighter makeup on one side and a contour on the other, it simplifies the process of creating a sculpted makeup look. To achieve a flawless finish, apply the lighter shade to the highest points of your face and swipe the deeper shade along its natural contours before blending well.
This well-known brand offers a complete range of face products to perfect your makeup look, from foundation to finish. Their line includes everything from concealers, blushes, and bronzers to foundations, contouring products, palettes, and powders, ensuring comprehensive coverage and color correction. Committed to ethical beauty, it’s a cruelty-free manufacturer, certified and acknowledged by PETA. It believes animals belong in our arms, not in a lab, and none of its products are tested on animals. Achieve a beautifully sculpted face with the confidence that comes from using compassionate cosmetics.
The Lifus Glow Kit is a versatile palette that includes four new highlighters designed to create a flawless, all-over glow. This highlighter makeup powder palette is perfect for achieving a radiant, luminous complexion. The highlighters feature a super silky soft texture that allows the light to naturally hit your face, providing seamless coverage and a structured finish without appearing overly dramatic or thick. One of this product’s most prominent features is its long-lasting formula.
With a highlighter factor that is both waterproof and smudge-proof, this palette ensures a comfortable and enduring wear throughout the day. Ideal for brightening various parts of the face, including cheekbones, eyelids, brow bones, inner corners, and lips, this highlighter makeup is formulated with light-diffusing pigments to enhance and perfect the skin. The versatile shades look great on any skin tone, making it a must-have for anyone looking to achieve a beautiful, glowing complexion.
Create a stunning chrome effect with Maybelline’s metallic highlighting makeup. This highlight powder features a unique blend of illuminating pearl pigments and a metallic chrome sheen, designed to give your complexion a radiant, luminous glow. The result is a brighter, more vibrant look that catches the light beautifully, perfect for anyone looking to add a touch of metallic brilliance to their makeup routine. This formula comes in a captivating collection of molten metal shades, including Molten Peach, Molten Topaz, Molten Gold, and Molten Rose Gold.
Each shade delivers a rich, reflective finish, allowing you to customize your highlight to match your mood and style. Beyond its cosmetic appeal, this highlighter makeup also boasts sustainability features recognized by trusted certifications. It’s designed with reduced air and/or water in the product or packaging, ensuring more efficient transportation and a smaller environmental footprint. With this metallic highlighter, you can achieve a dazzling chrome effect while supporting sustainable beauty practices.
Get positively glowing with Covergirl’s TruBlend Super Stunner Hyper-Glow highlighter makeup, a highly pigmented, multi-tonal, and luminescent highlighter designed to give you that showstopping glow. Available in three rich shades, it’s formulated to shimmer on all skin tones, offering a radiant finish that enhances your natural beauty. Simply apply this immensely pigmented powder to the high points of your cheeks for an illuminating glow that lasts. One of the standout features of this highlighter makeup is its rich payoff and smooth, blendable application.
The intensely pigmented powders ensure a vibrant and long-lasting glow, while the smooth texture allows for seamless blending, enabling you to create your perfect gleam effortlessly. Radiance is for everyone with this pick, as it looks great on all skin tones. Whether you’re fair, medium, or deep, it’s sure to complement your complexion and provide a luminous finish that accentuates your features. In addition to its exceptional performance, this popular brand is committed to cruelty-free beauty. Its products are Leaping Bunny certified by Cruelty Free International, meaning they’re never tested on animals. With this pick, you can achieve a radiant glow while supporting ethical beauty practices.
So what do we actually mean when we talk about highlighter makeup? Well, as the name implies, highlighter makeup aims to highlight certain areas of the face or body. It works by reflecting light and is often used as part of contouring, creating contrasting areas of light and shadow around certain parts of the face.
There are various forms of highlighter makeup, including powders, creams, liquids and sticks. These tools are popular in the world of cinema, used by professional makeup artists and actors to get the best look and draw attention to facial features like cheekbones and jawlines. For a long time, professionals were the only ones using a highlighter, but it has since become more widely spread.
The first thing to consider when purchasing highlighter makeup is what color you want. This probably has to do in large part with the color of your skin. You’ll want to have an idea of what tone your skin is as you begin shopping.
If you have skin that is more fair or light, you’ll want to shop for a highlighter makeup that pairs well with that particular skin tone. If your skin is darker, there are likely other choices available that will be a better fit for you. You’ll also want to think about what sort of color you want on your face, and many highlighter makeups will have multiple options for you to choose from.
Another factor that sets them apart from each other is their finish. Common finishes for highlighter makeups include matte, which has less glow and lighter reflective policies, and dewy, which tends to reflect more light and sits lighter on your skin. Dewy-finished highlighter makeups will have major glowing properties, while matte will provide less glow or shine. There isn’t a right or wrong answer here—it all has to do with what sort of look and feel you prefer.
You likely want a highlighter makeup that feels as good as it looks, so you’ll want to pay attention to how each option applies and feels once it is on your face. Most highlighters are powder-based, and the best ones are made to dissolve softly and effectively into your face. You’ll want to make sure when you’re applying that you don’t leave behind any rough edges. This can be done by taking time to properly spread and smooth the highlighter onto your face.
The last thing that may be of interest to you is whether or not your highlighter makeup is vegan. Not only does purchasing vegan makeup help protect the safety of animals and the sustainability of the environment, but it can also be more nourishing and less harsh on your face.
The packing is also often more environmentally friendly, along with the product inside. We have a couple of options on this list for vegan highlighter makeups, along with several more options that are cruelty-free (meaning they were not tested on animals).
Not sure where to apply your highlighter makeup for the best effects? Here are some of the top spots to use it:
One of the best ways to use highlighter is to apply it along the tops of the cheekbones. This will draw attention to your cheekbones and give your face a more defined, structured look.
It’s also possible to use highlighter makeup to bring definition and shape to your brow. To do this, apply the highlighter just below the brow bone.
You can even use highlighter makeup around your lips to make them look fuller and thicker. Apply a little of the makeup into the Cupid’s bow area (between the nose and the top lip).
Try adding a little highlighter makeup to the inner corners of your eyes. This helps to draw attention to your eyes and increases the dramatic effect of other eye makeup, like eyeliner and eye shadow.
If you don’t have much experience with highlighter makeup or have never used it before, you might find it tricky to start off with. Here are some tips and tricks to use to make applying highlighter makeup much easier.
It’s vital to choose a shade of highlighter makeup that works for you. Pick one that is just a little lighter than your own skin tone for the most natural results.
Location is everything when it comes to highlighter makeup. Make sure you use it in the right areas around the face, in spots that catch the light like the cheekbones, temples, brows and upper lip.
You can use other makeup products with highlighter makeup, like blush, bronzer and foundation. But for best results, opt for matte products to prevent your face from becoming too shiny or bright.
You’ll need to use some sort of application tool (or clean fingers) to rub highlighter makeup into your skin and blend it well. Commonly-used tools include fan brushes and small, damp sponges.
Do not put highlighter makeup all over your face. This is a big no-no. It will cause your face to look overall bright and shiny, giving you a totally unnatural glow.
All highlighter makeups are evaluated and tested before sale or production to ensure that they are safe for use on your skin. However, there may still be some products that are irritating for users with allergies or sensitive skin. If this is a concern to you, it’s best to look for products that are made to be especially sensitive and not known to elicit rashes or reactions. We’ll try to point out the best options for you as we go.
Typically, it’s fine to wear makeup throughout the day as long as it’s not irritating your skin. If you’re sweating while wearing your highlighter makeup, or if your skin is especially oily, you may need to reapply during the day for the best possible look and coverage. On the shelf or in your makeup bag, highlighter makeup will usually last somewhere between one and two years before it expires.
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