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Building a Make-up Kit Without Buying Everything
Building a Make-up Kit Without Buying Everything
BEAUTY · UNITED KINGDOM
Building a Make-up Kit Without Buying Everything
The products worth spending on, and the ones where price changes nothing
The make-up aisle is designed to suggest you need roughly forty products. Most people use six regularly and own thirty. The useful distinction is not between expensive and cheap brands, but between the categories where formulation genuinely differs and the categories where it largely does not.
Where spending more actually helps
Base products — foundation, concealer, tinted moisturiser. These sit on skin all day, need to match your tone precisely, and have to behave well as the day goes on. Formulation differences here are real and visible, and shade range is the main reason to choose one brand over another.
Mascara is the second. The brush shape and formula determine whether it flakes, smudges or holds a curl, and these vary enormously. It is also the product most worth replacing on schedule, every three months, because it sits next to your eye.
Where price changes very little
Eyeliner, eyebrow pencils, lip balm and most powder products. A black pencil is a black pencil. Budget brands have closed the gap almost entirely in these categories, and blind comparisons rarely favour the expensive option.
Brushes are worth buying decently once, but decent does not mean expensive. A small set of synthetic brushes, washed regularly, outperforms a large set of cheap ones left dirty.
Shade matching without a counter
Test foundation along the jawline rather than the wrist or the back of the hand, since the colour of your face and neck is what you are matching. Check it in daylight — shop lighting is calibrated to flatter and will mislead you.
If ordering online, look for brands publishing undertone information alongside shade numbers, and read reviews from people with similar colouring rather than the overall rating.
Order of application
Skincare first and fully absorbed, then primer if you use one, then base, then powder to set, then cream products, then powder products. Applying a cream blush over powder is the most common reason a finish looks patchy.
Let each layer settle for a moment rather than working straight through. Thirty seconds between base and setting powder makes a visible difference to how it wears.
Cleaning brushes
Wash brushes used with liquid products weekly and powder brushes every fortnight, in warm water with a gentle soap. Dry them flat with the bristles overhanging an edge, never upright, which lets water run into the handle and loosens the glue.
Dirty brushes are the most common cause of patchy application and of breakouts that people blame on the product itself.
Expiry is real
Most products carry a small open-jar symbol with a number of months. Mascara is three, liquid base products six to twelve, and powders considerably longer. Anything that has changed in smell or texture should go regardless of the date.
Buy fewer things, replace them on time, and wash your brushes. That is most of it.
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