Review Of The Week! Laura Mercier Secret Camouflage!

Laura Mercier Secret Camouflage $35 CDN

Let's be honest, I have a pretty fair complexion and very dark under eye circles that at times looks like I have either been up all night breaking night or doing blow.  I have tried and thrown out so many under eye concealers, that at this rate I could open up my own section at Sephora just for this product.

Since having baby number three,  two months ago, I no longer know what sleep is. Instead I have become a machine running on no sleep at night (or during the day) and using makeup to hide my tiredness.

On one of my recent trips to Sephora I decided that I needed a new concealer to hide my dark circles.  I went plain face without makeup (gasp!!) to Sephora in order to try different concealers out.  The nice sales lady told me that Laura Mercier made a good one that is considered full coverage called "Secret Camouflage".  It comes in 8 different shades ranging from very light to fairly dark. It has a dual split pot. One side (the darker side) to match your skin color while the other side (the lighter side) to match your skin undertone. You are suppose to be your own mixologist and combine these two in order to get the color coverage you need to hide all your imperfections.  While this seems like a good idea, nonetheless a few issues come to mind. 

1. Unless you actually know how tones and undertones work, this might be a problem for you if you don't know how much of each side (the dark and the light) to use.

2. This concealer is very heavy and thus offers full coverage.  However with that being said, it dries into any crease you have on your eyes and face if not properly blended or if you have dry skin.

3. You need to warm this up before using or it will be hard to blend.  

4. You need a concealer brush to use this.

I first tried this LM secret camouflage at Sephora.  It did wonders for my under eye circles and really gave them a full coverage coverup. However,  it creased right away. The sales associate said that happened because we didn't set it.  According to her, had we set it, then it would of gone on and stated on smooth. No problem I thought. So I bought it and took it home.  A few days later I tried it again and set it right away. To back up a bit, with my makeup routine, I first apply concealer then foundation.  I don't like how it looks the other way around.  I use foundation to blend it all out and make it look even.  It looked great for the first week that I used it that it made on my "few of my favorite things" blog post.

However as the weeks went by, even after applying my foundation, this concealer settled right into the fine lines of my face (not wrinkles but normal face lines and pores) though I did set it right away.  I then proceeded with my contouring and highlighting plus my face powder and setting powder for my whole face.

When I took a step back and admired the whole look, it left the area around on nose looking very dry, plus it settled into the creases of my eyes and made me look old and puffy.  Now keep in mind I made sure to moisturizer the hell out of my skin because with heavy concealers you need too. I also applied two eye creams in order to make sure my eyes were well hydrated.  Moreover, I heated up the back of my hand with a blow dryer in order to make the product more blended and soft when mixing and applying.

Sadly no matter what I did, this product still left that whole area of my face (nose and eyes) looking dry and creased.  This personally did not work for me no matter how much high hopes I had for it and I will be returning it to Sephora and trying out Bareminerals Correction Concealer on my next trip there.  I will let you know how that goes.  Off to Sephora I go!

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