Author's product rating: 
| Advantages: |
Contains sun protection but that's about it . |
| Disadvantages: |
Inferior colour and performance, not worth the money |
| Recommend to potential buyers: |
no |
One shouldn't believe everything one reads, of course – especially in fashion and beauty magazines. No, that bag and those shoes are not "must-haves". No, that lipstick won't make "him" want you. And no, following celebrities' skincare routines aren't going to make you look like them.
But every now and again they say something that's actually true – and one such gem of advice is that when it comes to make-up, getting your foundation right is most important.There's no point spending ages on your eye embellishments and lipgloss if your skin is bright orange, deathly pale or showing all the little flaws you'd rather hide.
I have documented both the perils of my skin type (pale, moody, liable to get irritated with me if I use the wrong products) and my exhaustive search for the right foundation (pale enough, good coverage and not making my skin break out in a leperous mess) in another of my Ciao opinions (for L'Oreal Ideal Balance). It was during this exhaustive search that I first tried
Revlon Skinlights on for size.
Normally spending over ten pounds on something that's going to run out makes me a little bit anxious, but on this occasion I thought I'd give it a shot and headed to the Revlon stand in my local Boots. Unlike the Maybelline and L'Oreal counters where there are usually a gaggle of teenagers and twenty-somethings hanging around rubbing different coloured products into the backs of their hands and pouting into mirrors, the only bystanders at the Revlon stand were two rather confused old ladies trying to work out which product was which, and I admit this almost put me off. But nevertheless I soldiered on and, as it was summer, selected the foundation with the best SPF (sun protection factor) – in this case 15, which is good enough for everyday wear, especially considering the minimalist sunshine of your typical British summer.
The foundation comes in 30ml tubular glass bottles with a pump action distributor at the top. As packaging for foundation goes, it's fairly aesthetically pleasing and not messy, and there's no lid to lose, but the pump action form of dispenser is a pain for two reasons – one, that it always fails to reach the stuff that's left in the bottom so you may not get your full 30ml's worth, and two, that you have very little control over how much is dispensed at once. With Skinlights I found that one pump left me with just a little too much foundation to blend naturally, and you can't exactly put the surplus back in the bottle so it's a bit wasteful.
The Skinlights range has what the good marketers of Blurb-land call an (ahem) "exclusive crystal complex illuminating formula with tinted flaw-diffusers" which will apparently "help conceal imperfections and blend seamlessly with your own skin tone for a natural, luminous look", leaving your skin feeling "soft, silky and smooth all day". This is fairly typical of the kind of bumf they usually put on the back of such products, and you have to wonder what percentage of all those products' claims could be dismissed as false advertising in a clinical trial, because I didn't find this to be the case at all with this foundation.
For one thing, I'm not a fan of the smell. This doesn't affect how the foundation performs, of course, but it is one of the first things you notice about a product and putting it on your face isn't made very pleasurable by having reservations about the aroma. It smells vaguely like some kind of medicine that's been artificially scented to try and make children like it – a sort of cross between disinfectant and weak cinammon. Not very nice at all.
The texture is quite good – light and more creamy than oily, being as this is an oil free formulation. Being pale as death, I automatically choose the lightest shade in every range – in this case Ivory – but was disappointed because, as with so many other cosmetic companies, Revlon seem to believe that human skin is meant to always be a lighter or darker shade of orange and have made all their foundation hues variants on a strange orange tan. All foundations are based on either pink or orange, but all to often the latter colour is taken on a bit too enthusiastically when pale people like myself tend to suit a pinker variation. Anyway, needless to say it didn't suit me as well as it should have, and it was a nightmare to try to blend it into any semblance of my natural skintone. God knows how they managed to get delicately pallid film star Julianne Moore onboard in their advertising campaign – off camera she must have looked like Lee and Herring's Curious Orange.
Aside from the colour itself, the
cover wasn't too great either (and since the dispenser gave me too much out anyway, it wasn't for lack of quantity!). Even the pale skin under my eyes, which is always easy to cover, didn't think much of Skinlights and shone whitely right through it. The "lights" element wasn't impressive at all. Light reflective pigments have become a very big business in base make up in the last few years, and I have successfully used several other products that use them, but this lacked the subtle glow of other "translucent" or "illuminating" foundations, and instead tended to look like plain old unattractive shine and had to be covered with loose
powder anyway, rather defeating the object of all that "crystal complex" nonsense it said on the back of the bottle. What little coverage it gives you seems to last a little longer than some cheaper foundations, but on average it's a bit rubbish overall for anyone to be championing it on the basis it doesn't evaporate within the first hour.
I tried Skinlights first, as I mentioned, in summer. On the one occasion I wore it I was so unimpressed I pretty much discarded it into a drawer and went on with my perfect foundation quest elsewhere. More recently, I decided to give it another chance. Knowing it's a little dicey colour-wise in natural daylight, I second-chanced it as a night-time/ going-out foundation when the only lights it would be exposed would be bouncing off a disco ball. I used a primer, blended it carefully, gave it the crutch of added concealer and looked in the mirror. Nope. It just didn't look right. Hmmm, I thought. That was a bit of a waste of £11 really. No wonder the old ladies had been confused: they were probably trying to figure out why anyone shells out so much money on such a rubbish product – and I'm sure whoever it is probably believes every advert in Vogue as well.
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