I fell down one of my occasional TikTok make-up holes the other day. I find the videos deeply hypnotic and surreal, which I suppose is the point. Every time I look, my main takeaway is absolute shock and awe at the amount of make-up people wear, whether they are (very) young or older (ie crones pushing 30). It is nuts — a whole new face laboriously painted on top of the perfectly nice existing face, not because you’re an actor or a drag act or a make-up artist illustrating a point, but rather for everyday life. I’m all for improving on nature occasionally, but going out of your way to camouflage utterly what nature handed out in the first place seems to me unhealthy and dysfunctional. Also, it must be depressing to see your face run down the sink when you wash it, and to go to bed looking like a completely different person. It must make dating weird. I think it’s good to wake up looking recognisably related to the person you were at 8pm the night before.
Anyway, on my Instagram a few days later was an ad for M&S’s excellent beauty department. It featured a young woman doing exactly the TikTok thing, ie spackling on a bananas number of products and emerging looking smoothly non-human and redrawn, like she’d applied a filter. M&S! Verily, the end times are coming. Some of us still like make-up that doesn’t look like make-up — make-up that helps things along, evening out here, smoothing there, highlighting there, without the end result looking like you’re wearing a disguise or an entire artificial head.
I struggle to find concealers I really like, and I now realise this is why. They’re usually too much. They’re like a skin graft. I want to blur away a shadow or little mark, not make the whole area look like it has had surgery or like it’s made out of smooth, glossy plastic. I find the textures challenging on middle-aged skin, and the finishes too finishy, as though they were designed to hide birthmarks or burns rather than bog-standard shadows under the eyes. So imagine my joy at finding Ilia True Skin Serum Concealer (£29; sephora.co.uk). This is the sibling of its True Skin Serum Foundation, which I haven’t tried but now quite fancy. I absolutely love the concealer, though, and here’s why: not because it conceals everything, but because it doesn’t conceal too much. It’s a dream under the eyes — exactly the right, light texture to smoothly and completely sink in without a trace, taking away marks of tiredness in its wake. No migration into lines and creases later in the day, either. It’s thin for a concealer — single cream rather than clotted, which is often exactly what you want — and it stays put. In terms of concealing it skims silkily (it is really smooth) rather than covering the entire surface in stucco with a trowel. As I say, I find it perfection under the eyes, where it does its job, brightens up everything and is undetectable. If you wanted more serious coverage elsewhere on the face, like to hide a great big spot, you’d probably find it too light, but that’s OK because it’s not like there’s a shortage of heavy-duty concealers. The shortage is in weightless concealers that look completely natural, such as this one.
It’s vegan, fragrance-free, silicone-free and cruelty-free, plus it comes in tons of shades that I think serve Asian skin tones particularly well. The “serum” element means it contains skincare, in this case peppy vitamin C.
India loves
Read The Story of Art Without Men by Katy Hessel (Hutchinson Heinemann £30). Like it says, the story of art retold with the men taken out. This book has blown my mind. Really passionately recommended.
