Flawless skin is one aspect that make up can bring you, so I am forever looking for the perfect base products. A few years ago, BB creams were all the rage. Boasting skincare benefits as well as coverage, they quickly became a bestselling product and last year Rimmel expanded their range. As their original BB cream is one of my favorite base products, I decided to give their Radiance 9-in-1 Skin Perfecting Super MakeUp in Very Light a try. Will it beat my experience with the Match Perfection Foundation which turned me into an Oompa Loompa?
Rimmel BB Cream Radiance 9-in-1 Skin Perfecting Super Makeup
Rimmel is known for a few of their classic foundation: the Match Perfection, Wake Me Up, and a few others. I never try any of them. The reason? The shade range available in The Netherlands is appalling. The lightest shade available is usually 200 and when there is a lighter shade it’s usually still far too orange. So you can understand my excitement when I found their Radiance BB Cream in the UK last year in a shade that seems right up my alley: Very Light.
This Radiance BB Cream retails for 6.99 pounds and available in 3 very light shades. The darkest shade is medium. It boasts to have 9 skin perfecting properties, which are as follows:
9-in-1 Skin Perfecting, Super Makeup:
1) Primes,
2) Smoothes,
3) Conceals,
4) Helps minimise the appearance of pores,
5) Provides natural coverage
6) Moisturises for 24 hours,
7) Awakens tired skin,
8) Brightens the skin, with Vitamin C complex and
9) Gives a Radiant Finish.
Rimmel seems to think this product can pretty much do it all. It should have enough coverage to conceal, stick to your skin like a primer, smoothen out skin and limit your appearance of pores. It should moisturize, make you look radiant and brighten up the skin. Pff, that’s a lot of doing for one product.
The ingredient list is a long one. The reason why I picked this up is because the only good experience I have with Rimmel is their regular BB cream in the blue tube. And since that only matches me in summer, as it is a tad dark for me, I thought that this would be a good pick. Anything labelled extra light is something I cling to like a moth to a flame, as I get super pale during winter time.
The BB cream comes in a tube like most BB creams. The packaging is easy to use and hassle free. The tube is a bit more slender than the original Rimmel BB cream which makes for easy storage. The color is a very light shade with a pinky undertone. Yay for the pinkness, as that usually suits my skin tone better than a yellow undertone. As you can see in the swatch (it’s the swatch on the right), the texture is very cream like and a tad thick. I found this applies nicely though: it goes on smoothly upon first application.
Nothing – Just on the left – full face
The color is spot on and I like the effect this gives. I had to a wait a few months before I could use it, as I wasn’t pale enough over summer to be using this. As we’ve hit February and I am at my lightest, I figured that a product titled Very Light would now suit my skin tone. And it truly does. The coverage is perfect for my mostly blemish free skin. It even hasn’t been very red lately, which is a plus. It almost looks a tad too light for me right now, but as you can see in the picture below, this shade perfectly matches my neck.
THE test to see whether your foundation has the right color is to check your neck. My neck is very pale compared to my face. In fact, the middle of my face is darker than the rest of my face and it goes paler towards the perimeter. So here you can see the color is spot on.
What is not spot on however is this product. So far I have been very positive about this product in this review, but in fact I absolutely hate this. I have added a close up picture to show you what this looked like once it started to dry down and work with my skin. Most foundations oxidize, but this does something completely different: where it goes on smoothly at first, the minute it dries down, it adheres to EVERYTHING on my skin. And when I say everything, I mean everything. From peach fuzz round my mouth to every pore on my nose. It looks like a dusting of pancake on my face, which makes for the least flattering look.
Full face
Thinking it had been my application, I tried everything under the sun and I just can’t get this to work. With a beauty blender this blends out horribly, with a brush or fingers it does fine. However, after a few minutes on the skin, it starts to sit on top of it, rather than blend in. It’s as if my face expels this product. I wore this to work last Monday to see how it would last throughout the day and to be honest I felt dirty. Halfway through the day, I rubbed my face accidentally and rubbed of curds (yes, like cheese curds) of the product along my jaw line. Yuck!
No matter which way I turn it, I cannot love or even remotely begin to like the Rimmel BB Cream Radiance 9-in-1 Skin Perfecting Super Makeup. Maybe it is just my skin because I did see some raving reviews on the Boots website just now. In any case, this product didn’t even remotely do anything for me. It left my make up looking cakey and I felt very self-conscious and a tad dirty all day. This was a complete miss.
What is your favorite Rimmel base product?
4 responses to “Rimmel BB Cream Radiance in Very Light”
I was actually looking at trying this, but I’ve changed my mind. I’ve got quite dry skin so I don’t even want to imagine how much this would cling to dry patches and how cakey it would look. Thank you for the review, super informative and in-depth! 🙂
Laura | sugarsmilebaking.wordpress.com
No problem! And yeah perhaps this product looks even worse on dry skin. Mine isn’t all that dry around my nose and that’s where it started breaking apart most quickly.
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