Best Beauty concealers truth in selling
Beauty products rarely live up to hype
Beauty products can seem awfully mysterious. Among all of the lotions and potions that crowd your average drugstore aisle, you’ll find many enigmatic claims about “defying” age, “revitalizing” crow’s-feet and “purifying” pores. Can any product live up to the hype?
“There’s a lot of misinformation,” says dermatologist Sandra Read, a spokeswoman for the American Academy of Dermatology. “A lot of claims being made out there are unsubstantiated.”
Nevertheless, many women — and not a few men — remain seduced by these pint-size elixirs of youth and pulchritude. Which beauty goods are magic in a bottle? Which are just gorgeously packaged gimmicks? Here, the scoop on a few products, new and old, that you may have wondered about.
Sad to say, firming lotions can’t flush away the results of too many Twinkies. Often, they contain something totally unrelated to fat cells and skin dimples: alcohol, which dries out the skin. “If it has enough alcohol to dry you out, you feel tight,” Read says. “It’s the sensation of firmness and tightness.”
Store shelves are well-stocked with pore-minimizing products. Some contain retinol, which loosens dirt and oil in pores, letting them be expelled naturally. You may also hear about pore-minimizing treatments, including microdermabrasion. All these can help clean your pores, and a squeaky-clean pore tends to look smaller than one filled with dirt and sebum.
But can anything actually alter a pore’s size in the long term, turning eraser heads into pin dots? “No,” Read says, laughing. The size of your pores is genetically determined.
Think of face primer the way you think of the stuff you slather on your walls: as a base coat that makes your paint (i.e., foundation) last longer.
“It’s one of my secrets when I do professional makeup,” says makeup artist Carola Myers. “It will conceal the signs of fatigue and add a luminosity to your makeup.” She suggests primers by Nars, Laura Mercier and Smashbox.
Applied after cleansing, a serum can moisturize, brighten or help firm skin, depending on its ingredients. This may sound magical, but serums are often quite similar to same-old moisturizers, although they may have slightly smaller molecules that can penetrate skin more deeply.
“I think they’re just trying to find new words for the same old thing,” Read says. “It’s just a liquid moisturizer.”
Toner rids the skin of dirt, impurities and excess oils. Of course, some people would say that’s the job of your facial cleanser. But this age-old product has its fans.
“You should use a toner at night, especially if you’ve been using makeup,” Myers says. “We all skip it, but every time I use it, I do feel very clean.” She likes those by Almay and Clinique but says “anything mild would be wonderful.”