CC cream

A CC cream is a tinted cream built around colour correction. Where a foundation hides uneven colour under an opaque layer, a CC cream is meant to cancel it — pigment chosen to offset a cast, green against redness for instance, or light-reflecting particles against dullness — so that less coverage is needed. Most carry a sunscreen, the finish is usually satin, and the coverage, in most makers’ telling, light to medium.

The letters do not mean one thing. They are usually read as “colour correcting”, but no standard fixes them, and sources disagree even about whether a CC covers more than a BB cream or less: a trade article of 2013 said more,^[1] while a New York Times report of 2014 called the CC the BB’s “lighter sibling”.^[2] In practice it depends on the maker — two of the CC creams on this page are sold as full coverage. Against its other neighbours the line is clearer: a skin tint or a tinted moisturiser is sheerer and does no deliberate correcting, a BB cream is the all-rounder sold on skincare, and foundation covers.

Start with what you want corrected. For redness — around the nose, across the cheeks — look for a formula sold as correcting it; some go on with a green cast that settles as you blend. For sallowness or dullness, look for one sold as brightening or light-reflecting rather than simply covering. For both at once, you are probably looking for coverage, and a full-coverage CC is a foundation by another name.

Then read the coverage claim, because the range is wide: from “medium coverage” for a hydrating cream to “full coverage” for another sold under the same two letters. Some CC creams come in only one or a few shades, on the maker’s claim that the pigment adjusts to the skin as it is blended. Test that claim on your own jaw, in daylight, before trusting it; on skin much deeper or fairer than the shade was made for, it may not disappear at all.

Finally, treat the SPF as the maker’s claim, and a CC cream as colour first. If sun protection matters that day, wear a sunscreen underneath.

Colour correction works by opposites. A green tint cancels red, which is why redness correctors, and several CC creams, look green in the tube. Peach and apricot cancel the blue-grey of shadows on light and medium skin; deeper orange and red do the same on deep skin. Lavender, or a cool pink, lifts a sallow, yellowish cast. A CC cream usually does one of these jobs gently across the whole face, where a corrector does it strongly in one place.

That is also why a CC cream can disappoint on skin that is uneven in more than one way. If you have redness across the cheeks and shadows under the eyes, let the CC deal with the larger problem, and use a little of the right corrector, or a concealer, on the other. Two tinted correcting creams layered over the whole face rarely look like skin.

If you wear a separate sunscreen, put it on first and give it a few minutes to settle; a CC cream worked over wet sunscreen slides, and its correcting pigment ends up in streaks. Then use a small amount, dotted where the colour is most uneven — usually the centre of the face — and blend outward with the fingertips, a damp sponge or a flat-top brush. Give it a minute before judging: colour-adjusting formulas are sold as changing as they are worked in, and one that looks grey or green at first may settle to skin tone.

Then look again, and add concealer only where something is still showing. The point of a CC cream is that it should need less on top of it; if you find yourself covering everything afterwards, a lightweight foundation would have done the job in one step.

The CC cream followed the BB cream out of Asia within a couple of years. A trade article of April 2013 described CC creams as new to the market from Korea; in the same publication that month, an analyst at Euromonitor counted Olay’s Total Effects CC Tone Correcting, which reached American shelves at the end of 2012, as the first mass-market CC cream in the United States, and noted that, like the BB, the trend had come from Asia.^[3]

Prestige houses were not far behind. By August 2013, when Chanel’s CC Cream reached Britain after launching first in Asia — an SPF 30 mineral sunscreen with hyaluronic acid and colour-correcting mineral pigments, in a single shade — L’Oréal, Olay and Clinique already had CC creams on sale.^[4]

The same Euromonitor analyst was frank about what had happened: CC creams had taken a concept that worked well, the BB, and given it “a marketing overhaul just at the moment when demand was starting to look vulnerable”.^[3] That is not a reason to dismiss them. The letters guarantee nothing, but the idea underneath — correct the colour and you need less cover — is the one behind every green or peach corrector in a makeup artist’s kit, and a good CC cream is simply that idea in a tube.