Colour-correcting palette

A colour-correcting palette puts several correctors side by side in one flat case: usually green, yellow, lavender and peach, often with an orange or red for deeper skin, and sometimes a brightening or skin-tone shade. Each pan is a dense cream in the colour opposite a discolouration — green against redness, peach and orange against blue-grey shadow, lavender against sallowness — to be pressed thinly onto that area and covered with concealer or foundation.

It differs from its neighbours in what it is for. A single colour corrector does one job; a palette covers several, which suits a face with more than one kind of unevenness, redness across the cheeks as well as shadows under the eyes, and it suits the make-up artist, whose kit has to serve many faces. A concealer palette is mostly skin shades, meant to be the match itself, with at most a corrector or two. A colour-correcting primer is a sheer tint for the whole face. If you have one concern, a single corrector is simpler; a palette earns its place when you use at least two of its pans.

Palettes are often sold in versions for lighter and deeper skin, and the difference is in the warm shades. On light skin a pale peach or pink cancels blue under the eyes; on medium and olive skin, apricot or orange does the same work; on deep skin it takes a deep orange or red, since a pale peach laid over deep shadow reads as grey. Green is the same in every palette and wants the lightest hand, because it is the shade most likely to show. Yellow is the mild all-rounder for slight redness and faint purple, and lavender brightens sallow skin.

Check what else is in the case before buying. Some palettes add a skin-tone concealer or two, some a highlighting shade, and one below adds setting powders. A pan you will never use is not a bargain, so count the ones you will, and make sure the warm shades reach your depth of skin.

Palettes differ in texture as much as in colour. The professional ones are usually firm, heavily pigmented creams, made to be warmed and thinned before use, so that a little covers a lot and lasts through a long day under lights. Drugstore palettes are often softer and easier to spread, but need more product to do the same work. Under the eyes, where the skin creases, a softer cream, or a thinner layer of a firm one, wears better. Set the corrected areas lightly, because a cream left unset tends to slide once concealer goes over it.

Work in order: correctors first, each only where it is needed, then concealer or foundation patted over the top, then a light press of powder. Use a small, flat synthetic brush or a fingertip, and lift each shade separately onto the back of the hand to warm it before it goes on the face. Mixing two neighbouring correctors — a peach with a touch of orange, for a shadow that falls between them — is fine; mixing opposite ones turns them to a muddy grey, and stirring corrector into concealer does the same.

Keep the pans clean. A brush dipped from green into peach carries a little green with it, and within weeks every pan drifts towards the same dull colour, so wipe the brush between shades. In a professional kit, where one palette serves many faces, scrape a little onto a clean mixing surface with a spatula rather than working straight from the pan. Kept closed and touched only with clean tools, a cream palette lasts; a change in smell or texture is the sign to replace it.

Choosing make-up by its opposite colour began with a camera, not a mirror. Early television registered colour so unevenly that make-up had to compensate for it. The Max Factor company had developed a make-up for television by 1932, working with the Hollywood station W6XAO, and in 1933 Popular Science reported that green lipstick and rouge were replacing red for actresses on television.^[1] A manual of 1936 set out the rule: because the transmitting cells were most sensitive to one range of colour, “the actual colour of the make-up must be the complementary colour of that which most affects the ‘electric eye’” — with a red-sensitive cell, green for shadows and eyebrows, and red “to soften out shadows and blemishes”. Better cameras had made those painted faces a thing of the past by the end of the decade.^[1]

Correcting colour by mixing, for the eye rather than the lens, came through powder. From 1928 Charles of the Ritz blended face powder to each client’s colouring, and by 1932 at the latest it had powder bars in department stores, where trained “powder colorists” mixed to order from twelve base shades, one of them a green. A company brochure of about 1941 claimed that blended powder, “by subtle mixing, disguises any defects in your skin tones”. The powder bars disappeared in the 1970s.^[2]

The creams in today’s palettes descend from the neutralising concealer, which the historian James Bennett counts among concealer’s later developments, and they work by the rule the television make-up of the 1930s applied to a camera: opposite colours cancel.^[3] When the first palette of them was sold to the public, the sources read here do not say.