Concealing Redness with Yellow Corrector: Comparison of Urban Decay Color Correcting Fluid and L.A. Girl HD Pro Conceal

Affiliate Links

On a daily basis, I don't tend to wear a full face of foundation or other base product. Some days I'll feel ambitious enough to slap on some tinted moisturizer, but it's rare that I use a fuller coverage foundation. Still, I have a significant amount of redness in my skin, especially in the center of my face, concentrated on either side of my nose. I've also been breaking out a lot lately, and that adds to the redness on my chin and forehead between my eyes. I want that shit to be less obvious.

Rather than covering my face with a uniform layer of product, my preferred camouflage is color corrector in the red areas, a liquid concealer under my eyes, and spot concealing for blemishes. Then I set everything with a loose powder, and I'm good to go. It probably takes nearly as much time for this routine as it would to use an opaque foundation, but for me, this is an easier, lower maintenance process. I also tend to like how my makeup looks by the end of the day. I've tried many foundations and I never really like how they wear, though some are better than others. Finally, I just don't love the feeling of foundation on my skin, and I get self-conscious about whether or not I'm rubbing it off somehow. So foundation is something that I tend to only use occasionally.

I've written about using the Urban Decay Naked Skin Color Correcting Fluid to conceal redness before (here). For whatever reason, yellow color correctors, as far as I've seen, are never advertised as targeting redness. In fact, I've never even seen anyone write a blog or Instagram post (etc.) saying that they use yellow corrector for this purpose. But I am here to tell you that if you haven't had good luck trying to cancel out redness with a green color corrector, it's worth giving yellow a shot instead. For me, green correctors tend to add a greyish cast to my skin, while yellow simply disguises the redness. You can see a comparison in my previous post of the subject, where I go into more detail about why I think this works.

(Yellow correctors are usually aimed at improving "brightness," but it's not clear to me exactly what problem this is correcting. If you use yellow for brightness, I'd love to hear about what it does for you.)

What I really want to do here is compare the Urban Decay yellow corrector, which contains 0.21 oz. of product for $28, with L.A. Girl HD Pro Conceal in Yellow, which contains 0.28 oz. for about $3-4 (depending where you buy it). I don't think I need to do any math for you to see the massive value difference there, so I had high hopes that the L.A. Girl option would be a functional substitute, since I use this corrector so much that I go through it very quickly. I'm not eager to drop another $28 on such a small product if I can avoid it.

Swatching the two yellow correctors, you can see some subtle differences. The Urban Decay corrector has a more opaque, whitish base, and the L.A. Girl corrector is slightly more translucent and lacks that white base. I'm not sure these differences are strong enough even to be visible in my photo, but they are detectable in person. Urban Decay on the left; L.A. Girl on the right.

Here's my bare face right now--as I said, I've been breaking out worse than usual for the past couple of months. I'm working on controlling that, but in the meantime, I'd like to disguise it.

You can see that the redness is concentrated on either side of my nose, but also between my eyebrows, and on my upper lip and chin. I also have mega dark circles that are reddish-purple.

Below I've applied the Urban Decay corrector on the left side of the photo, and the L.A. Girl on the right side of the photo. I've only used it over those red areas mentioned above. (I also put on mascara and brow pencil, as you can tell, because my face hairs are no longer completely invisible.)

I think you can see, despite the mediocre indoor lighting, that it works really well to conceal redness in a natural way on my skin. Can you see any differences between the right and left sides of my face? Personally, I can't see any in the photo, and I couldn't see any in person either. Any visible differences are just because the blemishes in my skin aren't perfectly symmetrical.

Here are closeups of each side so that you can see what the texture looks like on my skin. Again, I don't see any real difference. Both products have a slight tendency to highlight flakiness, but not dramatically, and not to the extent that I'm bothered by it.

Urban Decay:

L.A. Girl:

In these photos, I've used the corrector under my eyes, as well as on other red areas. For everyday use, I skip adding it to my eye area and just use my usual Sephora concealer (reviewed here), which has a slight yellow tint to it. I don't find that layering a yellow corrector under concealer in that area makes a big enough difference to be worth the extra work. I do, however, pat the extra Sephora concealer that's on my fingers after I blend it under my eyes on to the skin next to my nose. Then I spot conceal pimples with Urban Decay 24/7 Concealer Pencil, which seems, unfortunately, to have been discontinued. Finally, I set everything with loose powder.

Here's the final result with all my makeup (hey hey hooded eyelids!):

I like the results. As for other points of comparison between the Urban Decay and L.A. Girl correctors, the biggest difference is the packaging. The Urban Decay packaging is prettier, yes, but I also prefer it in terms of function.

I apply my concealer/corrector with a flat concealer brush (I have this stupidly expensive Clé de Peau brush that I got for free, but anything similar should work). I'd much rather just pick up the product from the UD doefoot than squeeze it out of the L.A. tube into its stupid brush tip. It's harder to control how much comes out of the squeeze tube. I suppose it might be easier to use up the last dregs of the product left in the squeeze tube at the end of its life, however.

In terms of wear time, they're about the same for me. It's not all left at the end of the day, but my face is still less red than it would otherwise be, and the makeup doesn't look cakey or weird.

Overall, since most things are about equal, I'd certainly recommend the L.A. Girl yellow concealer. It's cheap enough that even if you want to just experiment and figure out if yellow corrector will do anything for you at all, you won't be taking much of a risk. But I don't think there's a real advantage to the Urban Decay option, anyway. The slightly more translucent base of the L.A. Girl product also makes me think that it would work better on darker skin than the whitish Urban Decay corrector--though there is probably a limit, because it is still a light yellow.

I was seriously surprised by how well this L.A. Girl HD Pro Conceal corrector worked for me, considering that I had tried one of their regular concealers in the past, and wasn't impressed (reviewed here). But for a product like this that isn't supposed to match skin tone and isn't supposed to create a totally opaque concealing layer, it's fantastic.

Is there seriously no one else out there who uses yellow to cover redness? Hello? Anyone?