She's perfection personified but she keeps a superior eye on all the latest beauty products for you, the humble reader.
BB cream vs CC cream - why chose?
By
No comments
If you were to ask me what the biggest beauty trend to come out of 2012 was, I’d immediately point you towards the BB cream revolution. BB creams actually arrived in 2011 but like everything, took a few months to break through. Then wham bam every beauty brand was creating their own version and the craze that had been taking the eastern world by storm for years suddenly threw everything we thought we knew about creating the perfect base into disarray.
The BB cream revolution
Bridging the gap between the lightweight finish of a tinted moisturiser and the flawless coverage of a foundation, while there’s still a place for both I would imagine that the tinted moisturisers market now holds a much smaller audience share since the beauty balm (or blemish balm) boom.
It’s not surprising. One thing I love about the BB cream is its ability to deliver skincare benefits alongside its blemish-blurring properties. Pumped full of moisturisers, SPF, light-reflecting particles, anti-ageing hyaluronic acid and regenerative antioxidants, it makes life easier for ladies (myself included) who don’t want to layer product upon product every morning. I wouldn’t go anywhere without one now, especially at weekends when I can toss my foundation aside and turn to my BBs to give me that fresh-faced finish.
Now, I know that for most of you the aforementioned will seem like I’m teaching you to suck eggs but what you might not know is that brands are starting to move along the alphabet and the next big thing will be the CC cream. Another Asian obsession, this is an extension of the desire to create ‘perfect’ skin and this time CC stands for colour, or complete, correction.
The CC cream enters the scene
Chanel already sells a CC cream in Japan and if you do a 30-second search on Google you’ll see that Olay Total Effects CC Tone Correcting Moisturiser is the latest buzz in America. Claiming to reduce the appearance of dark spots, even skin tone and inject a burst if moisture in the skin, it doesn’t sound all that different to our everyday BB creams except this one promises to sort out skin tone and wrinkles too.
While we might not be at the front of the CC cream queue, L’Oreal Paris’s version is launching here next month and will definitely come in handy for some of us with specific concerns. Following the age-old trick of colour-correcting, the trio of CCs fights against redness, dullness and tired skin with clever creams that counteract and rebalance your skin tone. We’ve all seen the green sticks and yellow-pigmented concealers that make redness disappear – these are supped up versions of those.
So, if you suffer with redness, you need to reach for the green-based cream. If you have dull, sallow skin, you need to use the purple-pigmented cream and if you have a greying pallor that needs brightening up, you need a burst of apricot tones to make your complexion look alive again. It’s simple colour wheel stuff.
One good thing about these is that you can really tailor them to your concerns and they follow the same principle of L’Oreal’s original Nude magique BB cream – they come out an off-white with tiny purple specks (or smart pigment capsules if you want to get all tech savvy) that pop onto your skin when you rub it in creating a natural flawless finish.
Lighter in consistency compared to a BB cream, perhaps because these are more targeted to specifics than for use over your entire face, CC creams are also said to contain less silicone which will make them easier for your skin to absorb. They also come with a promise of 12-hour hydration.
From what I’ve seen CC creams are not to replace the BB cream, they're an extension of the original idea to provide an even more flawless finish. I’ve been using the Anti-Dullness version and it does feel lovely on the skin plus, while it can’t make the bags under my eyes disappear, my skin hasn’t looked as tired and lack-lustre since I began my trial. I’m not binning my BB creams yet but this makes that flawless even spot-free finish just that teenier bit easier to achieve. What have you got next Japan? We’re ready and waiting!
L’Oreal Nude Magique CC creams, available from March, £9.99 each
