With the pandemic meaning cosmetic testers are pretty much a thing of the past and online colour matching services varying in accuracy, finding the right foundation shade can be a bit of a guessing game. Sure, you might have followed all the instructions and considered your undertones, but there’s still a chance you will find the product doesn’t quite match up, leaving you out of pocket as well as barefaced.
In the best case scenarios, you’ll be able to return the foundation and get your money back (brands like Il Makiage and Charlotte Tilbury accept returns even if you’ve opened the product to test it out). However, in the majority of cases, you’ll be lumped with the wrong shade.
Before you chuck it in the bin, or else hoard it in your makeup bag in case you change shade over the coming seasons, there might be a way to restore hope for your mismatched foundation, courtesy of TikTok (where else?).
According to Rose Siard, the founder of Rose and Ben Beauty, it’s possible to correct your foundation shade using the simple hack of mixing pigments. Drugstore foundation. We love it, but we can’t swatch it, so it’s hard to find our shade,” she says in the video.
Rose then holds up four brightly coloured tubes, including blue, orange, yellow and white. “These are mixing pigments, and they’ve saved all of my foundations.”
She goes on to show one of her favourite foundations that is just a little too light for her skin colour before squeezing out a blob of pigment from the orange tube, and a blob of pigment from the blue tube. “I’m going to grab a little bit of the orange and most of the blue,” she explains.
She mixes the blue and orange pigments with the original foundation to create a bespoke shade. “It’s a perfect match to my neck,” she adds.
As well as making a foundation lighter or darker, Rose also demonstrates that mixing pigments can alter the undertone of a formula as well. “Maybe this [the foundation] isn’t your undertone, and you need it to be more yellow,” she says while squeezing some yellow pigment onto her hand. “This will warm your foundation.” She doesn’t stop there. Rose goes on to show how the same trick can be used to alter the shades of concealer, too.
Rose uses PRO.color Foundation Mixing Pigments, which unfortunately aren’t available in the UK. However, Revolution Beauty have an almost identical set of cream pigments that are guaranteed to do the trick.
Happy mixing and matching!
