Being a self-proclaimed highlighter enthusiast, I am constantly checking out new brands and their products to try and find the best one for my skin type.
The Good – We’ll kick this off on a positive note; my all-time favourite highlighter is the Becca Shimmering Skin Perfector in Moonstone. It is a liquid consistency and meant to either be mixed into foundation to add a luminosity or to be applied to the typical highlight areas at the end of your makeup application. Being as intense as it is, I like to apply it as a normal highlight at the finish of my makeup. It has more of a gold to champagne tint to it which I find more flattering than a silver to white finish. Due to the liquid nature of the product, it finishes super naturally and is almost undetectable as an additional product sitting on your skin unlike powder products which you can normally see. All in all, this baby is a lovely “glowing-from-within” highlighter.
The Bad – Laura Geller Baked Gelato Swirl Illuminator in the shade Ballerina – despite the title, ‘Bad’ – is actually my second favourite highlighting product in my makeup collection. It is a very fine powder, making it on the more natural end as far as dry products are concerned. The colour is a lovely peach-toned champagne which definitely adds a nice blush aspect. All of this being said, I have two major issues with this product. The first is that being a powder consistency, there is no real way to avoid it from clinging to dry patches in my skin – completely unflattering! The second is that the sheen of this product is intense. For all of those girls who live for a highlight that you can see from miles away, Laura Geller is the one for you. For me, a girl who prefers a natural highlight, this one just isn’t quite my favourite – maybe more suitable for a night-out makeup look.
The Ugly – Sephora MicroSmooth Baked Luminizer in the shade Stardust is coming up at the bottom of my list for this category. This was the first illuminator product I ever tried and so I thought it was amazing when I first started using it as it does add a noticeably subtle sheen to the cheekbones. This being said, once I discovered the amazing world of highlights, I too discovered that this one was also near the bottom of the food chain. While it gets the job done and highlights where it is applied for an affordable price, it holds a fine line between looking smooth and looking cakey. Also, while the colour is supposed to be a more silver/white cast, it is almost more opalescent so it has almost multicoloured fragments of shimmer which means that sometimes it almost comes across as yellow-y.
Well there you have it – the first installation of my beauty review series. This is just my take on the products as obviously they will work differently for different people, but all I know is that from now on I will be sticking to purchasing cream or liquid highlighters only!