The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
Beauty brains/the manual
Luminising creams and cycling accessories
Feel the benefits of going foundation-free with a luminising cream
Remember skin? The stuff beneath the foundation, primers, shaders and highly pigmented shadows? It’s back.
A survey for Boots No7 in mid-april confirmed what we probably already suspected: 82 per cent of us have been wearing less make-up through lockdown, but also before. Kardashian contouring had become so ubiquitous and extreme, there had to be a backlash sooner or later.
But interestingly, not going out and seeing people hasn’t stopped us from caring about how we look. The focus has switched to skincare rather than skin cover. With cleaner air, less rushing about and less foundation, many of us have seen our skin texture and health improve. Less begets less.
On cue, come the winged angels of luminising balms and serums to provide active care as well as glow, radiance and colour, minus the masking effect.
One of my favourites is Trish Mcevoy’s
Beauty Booster Soothe and Illuminate Cream, which packs in a lot of light reflectors. It’s also free of gluten, fragrance, parabens, PEGS (petroleum-based compounds), phthalates, silicones and sulphates.
The latest love child of Professor Augustinus Bader and Victoria Beckham Beauty is Cell Rejuvenating Priming Moisturizer, a ‘clean’ formula that includes the prof ’s now famous TFC8® technology, which triggers cell renewal. It provides more sun-kissed colour than the Mcevoy, but is also more sheer. You can layer it for more colour, but I like its subtlety. At £92, you’ll be glad to know that only a few pumps are required.
For more coverage, Code 8’s nourishing Radiate Beauty Balm is still super-easy to blend and lends a lovely, lasting gleam.
They’re all terrific, but for value for money, and clean credentials, it’s hard to beat RMS Beauty’s Luminizer cream with light-catching minerals. This won’t provide any kind of ‘tan’ – just gorgeous, youthful-looking skin.