I was really excited when I saw the advertisements for Maybelline's new
Fit Me, products. Like most women, I am constantly looking for the perfect powder, concealer and foundation that suits my skin tone perfectly, looks natural, and gives me the coverage I need. Unfortunately, most products, especially finishing powder only come in very limited shades for Light, Medium and Deep skin tones. With the ranges of nationalities and skin shades across the world, how could everyone possibly fall in to one of 3 shade categories? Well, they don't; so I remain forever on the hunt for the perfect powder.
My skin tone seems to fall in the mid level of the light range. It is above a porcelain complexion, but just a smidge below a true light-medium skin tone. As far as whether I am a Warm (looks best in browns, reds, yellows and oranges) or a Cool (looks best in jewel tones like purple and fuchsia), remains to be seen. To look at me, you would say definitely Warm, but if you do the vein test (blue veins-Cool, green veins- Warm), I have blue veins, making me a Cool. Once again, a supposedly fool-proof way of categorizing everyone in to a group that doesn't really work.
Most of the time I end up using both a light and a light medium powder and mixing them and just going by what I see in the drugstore against the inside of my arm. I have a tendency to turn the make up darker than it appears in the packaging due to my body chemistry, so I often start off with a light dusting of a medium shade of powder so that I do not look too light, and use the light shade throughout the day as needed for touch-ups.
To figure out the shade of Fit Me I needed, I went to the Maybelline website and participated in the
Fit Finder. I also had my trusty friend Jamie sit next to me and provide her un-biased shade opinion. From the very first question I was thrown off. It was something like "After 20 minutes in the sun with your skin un-protected, do you, A. Tan, B. Burn". Well, my skin does both. Sometimes it burns, sometimes it tans really easily...Ok, well, to compromise I picked answer B, because my light skin does burn the first couple times I am in the sun during the year unprotected. Selecting this answer put me in the light range. The second question was "Which shades look best on you?", and it provide me with two sets to choose from that would determine whether I was Warm or Cool. One set of colors was an orange, red, yellow set. The other was a purple, blue, turquoise set. I never wear yellow, and orange looks horrible on me. I do wear red, but I wear purple, blue and turquoise more. I mentioned this to Jamie, and she told me to choose the Red-Yellow-Orange group. "You are definitely a Warm" she said (I have actually been categorized as both at make-up counters). Finally, we were given a choice of 3 shades to choose from to pick the one that matched my light skin tone the best. "Pick the darkest shade, definitely" Jamie said. I agreed. It was shade 130.
This is where the difficulty began. shade 130 turned my face orange. It is very deeply pigmented and has more pink in it than I expected. I definitely have a lot of gold-yellow in my skin, and not beigey orange. From there, I then tried shade 210, in the Medium range. It had more muted- yellow tones in it, which seemed like it would match my skin tone better than the beigey pink of 130, but it turned my skin an even brighter shade of orange, minus the pink. Then I looked at the Cool shades. Maybe I was a Cool? The Cool shades had no yellow in them and instead had shades of ashy-pink. Definitely not me. Extremely frustrated, I chose the second lightest shade in the light range, Ivory, or shade 120, and finally, I found my match. Ivory was the exact color my sun-weary, porcelain friend Jamie chose for herself when she did the Fit Finder. Jamie is what is often thought of as a true, fair-skinned Ivory, while I am really not. This Fit Me shade of Ivory is obviously not a true Ivory to the eye, because it is too pigmented. To me it looks more like a light sand color, which is what I would normally wear and choose in the drugstore.
I do really like the Ivory, 120 Fit Me powder. It has a nice color and coverage and is breathable and not too heavy. Is it worth all the trouble I went through to find it? Probably not.
Bottom Line- These powders are more highly pigmented than you would expect. Do not trust the online shade selector, the name of the powder, the models in the advertisements listing "their" shades, or the shade you see in the store. If you are interested in the Fit Me powder, I would purchase it from an Ulta Concept Store if possible. In the Ulta Concept Store, they let you try on all make-up in the store so that you can make sure the shade you select works for you. I would also let the make-up sit on your skin for at least 30 minutes to see if it changes shades.
Where to purchase- Drugstores everywhere, or
http://www.maybelline.com/.
