Heads Up: The Hourglass Travel Size Ambient Lighting Powders are bullshit

I noticed the other day that Sephora had added travel sizes of all of Hourglass's Ambient Lighting Powders to the selection, which seems, on the surface, like a good option if you have been considering trying one of them but not sure how much you'd like it. Previously they had Dim Light in this size, but not the others. They're $22, less than half the price of the full-size powder ($46).

But check this out: the full size contains 10 g/0.35 oz. of product and the travel size contains 1.4 g/0.049 oz.! So you get about 15% of the product for almost half the price? In other words, the regular powder is $131 per ounce and the mini is $449 per ounce. Um, no fucking thanks. I get that sometimes the price per ounce/gram isn't that important factor to consider if it's a bottle of nail polish or a lipstick that you think you'll never finish, but these are supposed to be everyday face powders that you presumably would use up and replace. It's worse than their holiday palette.

Just in case you ever doubted that the cost of the product itself makes up much less of the price than the cost of the packaging (not to mention arbitrary profit margins).

I noticed how tiny these things were a couple of weeks ago, but this post I saw while browsing the Makeup Rehab subreddit today inspired me to write about it.

(I've tried the ALPs from samples I got from So Choix, where you get five samples for $15. I wonder if that would come out to 1.4 g between the five, but I don't really have a way to weight and calculate that. I'd say I get at least a dozen uses per sample.)

Powder for the Pasty: Review of e.l.f. Tone Correcting Powder in Cool (and a comparison with Nars Light Reflecting Pressed Powder)

Disclosure: This post contains an Amazon affiliate link.
I'm going to discuss an e.l.f. product that I know a lot of people hate right now, and I'm going to give it a favorable review. I came to my conclusions about this stuff before I posted a review of some stupid sparkly e.l.f. shit and people commented how much they also disliked this non-sparkly e.l.f. powder. So I decided to take a little more time to test it and to think about it, and ultimately I ended up in the same place I started. I like it. But as with all personal reviews of cosmetics (and other things), you'll have to consider how much you have in common with me when you try to decide whether or not e.l.f. Tone Correcting Powder in Cool ($3) will work for you. In particular, I think this is a product that will work best for people with very pale, cool- or neutral-toned, combination or oily skin. Like me.

e.l.f. Tone Correcting Powder in Cool

As you can see, I've already used up quite a bit of this stuff, so the embossed e.l.f. logo on the bottom right is starting to fade away. I find it useful and wear it regularly.

This is one of those multi-colored products that promises to correct whatever skin-tone problems you have. At first I was really skeptical, because when you mix the colors together, won't they just cancel each other out? Like if green is supposed to cancel redness, and you mix it with pink . . . yes, yes they will. The more I thought about it, though, I realized that the point is to create a neutrally-colored powder to cancel whatever you've got going on. In this case, as the shade name suggests, the powder will end up a bit cool toned, because it has more blue than any other color in it (because it has both blue and green). If they mixed all the colors together in advance, you'd have a palette full of an ugly greyish powder. So they give you pretty pastels and let you do it yourself.

Unlike other multi-colored neutralizers, like the Stila One Step Correct Primer, with this powder you have the option (in theory) to just use one shade at a time to counteract a particular skin issue (green for redness, blue or blue+pink for sallowness, yellow for makeup that is too cool or for purple undereye circles, pink+yellow for bluish undereye circles, etc.). Of course, the effectiveness of this technique will depend how pigmented or opaque the powder is. I decided to swatch each color over black (Urban Decay eyeliner in Zero), because if I just swatched them on my pale-ass arm, you would be looking at photos of nothing right now. Swatching over black makes the pigmentation/color of each part of the powder easier to detect and can also provide an idea of how sheer this stuff is.

e.l.f. Tone Correcting Powder in Cool: heavy swatches (from left to right) of yellow, blue, green, pink, and all four colors combined.

When the individual colors are heavily swatched over black, it's clear that the blue powder is the least opaque. The green has least tint, showing up as nearly white here. When all four colors are combined, you get, as expected, a greyish white. A cool neutral. (This post is a long one with some large photos, so click through to see the rest.)

Cheap near-dupe for Nars Light Reflecting Powder? (from Makeup Withdrawal)

Makeup Withdrawal compares Wet N Wild Take on the Day Mattifying Powder to Nars Light Reflecting Powder and finds them to be pretty close.

I actually bought that Nars powder a while back when I won a gift card and wanted to use it on some kind of product that I didn't think I could find in a cheaper version. I guess I should have waited! Or gone with one of the Hourglass powders. (By the way, I still stand by what I said in this post: I think finishing powders can add a little something, but they are subtle and not crucial. I don't really notice when I forget to use one. But now there are more cheap options, so the cost/benefit aspect is a little different.)