tinted moisturiser

power perfection BB cream

Hey! Hope everyone’s been having a good day. 🙂

Well, Garnier has released its first “BB” cream for the Australian market recently (and nooo I haven’t tried it yet!). I’m not sure how well it’s doing, as BB creams are new to most Aussie women. (Garnier’s BB cream is on sale as of Thursday at Priceline if you are keen to try it! :))

BB creams are very popular in Asia, particularly South Korea, and so you can usually find these creams from brands originating from that part of the world, such as THEFACESHOP. What is BB cream? Well, the BB stands for Blemish Balm. In a nutshell, my understanding is that BB cream is a form of tinted moisturiser in which the moisturiser component tends to have a lot of groovy extra ingredients including but not limited to antioxidants and high SPF. Some creams have anti-acne properties whilst others have anti-ageing ingredients, or whitening ingredients, and so on. The cream also tends to have better coverage than tinted moisturisers, which can be very sheer indeed!

So how handy is that? A tinted moisturiser that goes beyond the standard ones by adding helpful ingredients and good coverage. You could end up  saving a lot of time in that you dont need to put on moisturiser then concealer and then your foundation.

Hence, when I was lucky to pick up some free samples of THEFACESHOP’s Power Perfection BB Cream I was stoked! (You might wonder why I keep getting free samples from them – I buy their sheet facial masks regularly and so they’ll pop in a sample or two for me each time I shop there. 😉 I will review the sheet masks soon!) This particular BB cream is designed to provide medium coverage and has anti ageing properties including a decent SPF of 37.

Here are my thoughts:

 Price range: approx. $50 AUD (!) for 40ml

Where can I buy it? Exclusive to THEFACESHOP… you may be able to find it online (eBay etc) too.

Unlike the foundation I’d sampled recently from the same brand, this sample clearly stated its shade – Natural Beige. This seemed promising! I took a couple of photos (sorry about the dodgy lighting :() to give you an idea of what the colour actually looked like – it turned out to be fine for me. However. just in case of colour disasters, again I made sure to try this out on a day I wasn’t planning on going out anywhere (LOL! :)).

(Due to the bad lighting I took 2 photos… sorry about the pic quality!)

The texture of the cream was similar to that of a liquid foundation, and I remembered the shop assistant’s advice – to “pat pat pat” the cream onto the skin, rather than rubbing it in as you would a standard moisturiser. Unfortunately the “pat pat pat” technique didn’t really suit the consistency of the cream, as it was then too thick on my skin. So I decided to just carefully smooth it over my face as I usually would with a foundation. It did not have any particular scent which I was pleased with, as my skin can be on the sensitive side.

I’m very impressed with this product. The cream provided a good amount of coverage – but not too heavy – and my skin looked natural but flawless. It had a slightly dewy finish but unlike the THEFACESHOP foundation I previously tried, I did not look melted by the end of the day! A little of the product goes a long way; I did not need all of the 1ml sample package. It was easy to remove at the end of the day with liquid face wash and water.

As I was fortunate to receive two samples of this product, I also tried it out on a day I was due to go to work. I work in an office environment but have to walk a reasonable distance to and from public transport and I like to go outside for a walk during my lunch break. (So it was going to really get exposed to the elements! ;)) Again it performed really well and still looked good, with no touchups, when I went to take it off at night!

After my experience with this product I’m very tempted to buy it! I already have a lot of makeup that I’m happy with, so if I do buy this I’ll be most likely to use it on work days as they’re the days I tend to have to get ready in a rush (& so could save a lot of time with a BB cream rather than my usual routine). Unfortunately, when I visited my local store to get some today, it was completely sold out. 😦 So it seems others are very happy with it too!

Beautiful rating: quality 5/5, value 4/5. It is a great product but due to the packaging used in the full sized bottles I’m not sure if it would last very long… and I think that is an important factor as it is not cheap.

For more information: when doing some reading on BB creams to broaden my own knowledge, this particular article stood out. It even includes videos!  http://www.squidoo.com/b-b-cream