I mentioned that I've been crazy busy and I have a bunch of things to share with you all. Some are life changing things and some are just random fun bits. Those are usually the easiest so I'm starting with one of those.
I may not have mentioned this before but for many years now I have been a consumer test volunteer. That is I offer myself up to test out new products, give feedback, etc. Sometimes the things I've gotten to try out haven't even made to the public and sometimes they are things that are out and about already and companies just want feedback. Mostly I've done this for the fun of trying new things which I'm a big fan of. Now this concept in the day and age of bloggers isn't really earth shattering and previously I've not really shared too many of these (if you've seen my Instagram you might have seen a Fitness First one a little while back) because I've never been sure if it's actually something that we're supposed to do. Sometimes we're asked specifically to share and get feedback from other people, other times it's a bit more confidential. More and more though the companies I work with have been asking us to share things and talk to people about what we're doing (like Fitness First did) and given that I already have this blog I thought I would start putting them here too.
So, recently I got given a sample of The BB Cream by Garnier to try out and give my thoughts. Now this is only the second BB cream I've ever tried but I am a big fan of combo skin care and usually lean towards tinted moisturisers rather than full on foundations so I was excited to give this one a go.
This cream claims to: moisturise, correct, brighten, protect from uv, and offer natural coverage.
Obviously the key points here for a BB cream are the correcting and brightening. I actually can't attest to this as I couldn't specifically see a difference after the 3-ish applications that I got out of the sample but there were some aspects that I really liked.
Coverage is nice and natural and it blends really well. I had the Light tint and it was still a bit tan for me but then this is always my issue, even trained make up artists seem to underestimate how truly pale my skin is, I think my colouring confuses them.
Anyway, you can see here the colour difference straight up.
However once it was blended it wasn't too noticeable and like I said, nice and natural. I managed to forget to actually take a photo of the finished look - not used to recording these things as I go - so you will have to take my word for this one.
UV protection for me is key these days for so may reasons so this one is a no-brainer. It's like airbags - should come standard.
I'll admit that I didn't use this as my primary moisturiser because I think you can always do with more moisture for your body and your skin, especially here in Australia. It was nice and light weight, didn't feel cloggy and settled in really nicely. It was a good think consistency (the first BB cream I tried was really runny which I didn't like) and went on really easily.
One of the things for me with anything that I'm putting on my skin is smell, which might seem strange but I trust my nose to tell me if there's anything in there that might not be good for me. As they say if you wouldn't eat it don't put it on your skin, so smell helps a lot with this. This one has a nice clean smell to it, sort of like a nice fresh soap smell.
Unfortunately this was one of the turn offs for me with the previous BB cream that I'd tried which was Maybelline. It probably wasn't a fair comparison because I was coming off an Organics range but it smelled very chemically to me which set off alarms, so I always made sure to cleanse especially well after I wore it.
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| Maybelline BB Cream |
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| Physician's Formula Organic Wear - my current go to |
One big downside for me with this brand though is that they test on animals and that's just not cool.
I'm a big supporter of cruelty free wherever possible so I will probably be going back to my Organics range but it was an interesting experiment.
Overall I would say that for me if I'm looking after my skin holistically (eating well, drinking lots of water, exercising, and bathing well with simple but quality products) I probably wouldn't need my foundation to be doing the correcting or brightening, in which case a nice tinted moisturiser with SPF is more than enough.
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