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Friday, August 23, 2013

Giorgio Armani Concealer and Master Corrector Review



I had one of those Fridays where I felt the week was long and a self-treat was in order... so I ended up at the Giorgio Armani counter and decided to finally try the infamous Master Corrector and High Precision Retouch concealer.  Click the jump to see what I thought!




I can be a sucker for packaging at times, and have to say that GA packaging overall is nothing to rave about.  The boxes are very simplistic, though I do like the matte box of the concealer.


Let's first talk about the infamous Master Corrector. This product is advertised as 4 shades but the counter I was at only had 2, the pink and the orange. I was advised by the counter MUA that the pink was for fair-skinned ladies and that darker/warm-undertoned ladies like me should use orange. 


Overall the orange does work fine on me but I disagree with his reasoning (I am actually more of a neutal/cool-toned asian).  If you look at the color wheel below:


There's whole courses on color theory so I won't go into that much detail, but basically OPPOSING colors on the wheel will kind of cancel or neutralize each other out when you put them over each other. For this reason we put green color correctors for red discolorations (like acne), violet/pink for brown hyperpigmentations etc. What color corrector will work for you depends on what you're correcting. In my case, it's dark undereye circles, which on me, appear blue-purple-ish to almost brown-muddy (great image I'm giving you eh).  If you look on the wheel that kind of lands me in the yellow-orange category.  The idea is then you would put concealer or foundation OVER the corrector.

If you skip the corrector step the discoloration will still likely show through, albeit somewhat diminished. Please refer to KJB's excellent blog post on color theory and undereye circles.



Next is the HPR concealer.  Again, very simple and minimalistic packaging. This is no fancy dancy lacy metals of YSL, but I kind of like it. This concealer is supposed to contain some light-reflecting pigments that give you a "radiant" look. I spread it all over my face to see what that effect is, and it reminds me most of the finish of Face Atelier's Ultra foundation (which I believe is similar to GA's luminous silk foundation as per others; I have never tried luminous silk so I won't comment on that)


Both the concealer and the corrector come with a very thin brush applicator.


Master Corrector in #2 (orange) on the left; HPR concealer in #1 on the right. You will hear different MUAs say different things about what shade your concealer should be. Some will say it should be the same as your foundation/skin, some will say it should be 1-2 shades lighter so as to highlight certain areas (undereye, nose bridge etc.)  I'm more from the camp that says to match the concealer shade to foundation, since I don't want my blemishes highlighted, and I would prefer just to use an actual highlighter (or a lighter foundation shade) to highlight the areas I want. 

GA MUAs are generally known to recommend concealers 2 shades lighter. Hey, it's Friday, so I went with it! So I was recommended #1, which has a very slight pink-undertone, and it actually looked fine over the corrector. Now think back to how the MUA said earlier that I was dark and warm-toned?... and then recommends a fair and cool-toned concealer? Huh? His eyes were working better than his head... This concealer actually works great for me, because I'm cool-toned! Unfortunately me being Asian made him automatically think I'm warm-toned, which is a huge mistake and then that's how us asians end up looking overly yellow (and often sickly so...)


As you can see, the Master Corrector is very very pigmented! The concealer...not so much!




Now here's where the cool part of color theory comes in, see that blu-ish vein that runs down the my arm? You see it and then you don't...it compeletely disappears under the orange!



Overall, the HPR concealer is nothing special.  It's fine, if you want to try it go ahead I've got nothing bad to say about it. It does blend nicely, just know that it is more light to medium coverage at most.  The corrector however, is pretty cool stuff! Other correctors I've tried, like Bobbi Brown, are THICK as heck, and hard to blend, despite their good coverage.  The Master Corrector gives the amazing coverage, but is thin and easy to blend!  It is $37 CDN, so a bit pricey, but I think the little extra you pay compared to Bobbi Brown is worth it!

Then again, it is Friday and I'm on a splurge, so maybe ask me again when I've over my retail-therapy... :)

Have you tried either of these GA products? Let me know what you thought!!


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