Colour-correcting primer

A colour-correcting primer is a primer with a tint in it. The base is the same silicone or water gel as any other primer; what changes is a small load of pigment, chosen to work against a particular cast in the skin. Green is sold against redness, lavender or violet against a sallow, yellowish tone, and peach, apricot or pink against dullness and grey. Smoothed on thinly, the tint mixes with the skin’s own colour and takes the edge off the cast, so that the foundation on top has less to cover.

It sits between two other products, and it is easy to reach for one when you mean another. A colour corrector is a dense cream or stick laid on a particular mark, a red blemish or a dark circle, and concealed over; a colour-correcting primer is sheer, worn across whole areas of the face, and should almost disappear as you blend. A CC cream is a base in its own right, often worn with nothing on top. The primer is meant to be covered.

Look at your bare face in daylight and name the problem before you choose the colour. Redness that sits across the cheeks and around the nose, or that flushes and fades, is what green primers are made for. A face that looks yellowish or tired, especially under artificial light, is what lavender is sold for, and it brightens fair and light skin most. Peach and apricot are for skin that looks flat or greyish, particularly medium and deep skin, where a pale tint would sit on top as a film; pink is sold to fair skin for the same reason.

Most people need only one, and many need it on only part of the face. Choose the sheerest version that does the job. A strongly pigmented green worn all over cancels redness where you have it and turns the rest of the face grey where you do not.

Apply it after skincare and before foundation, in a thin layer: a pea-sized amount does a whole face, and less does the areas that need it. Smooth it outward from the reddest or dullest place, feather the edges, and let it set for a minute until it no longer feels wet. Then check it in a mirror by a window. The tint should have almost vanished, leaving the skin a little more even; if you can still see green or lavender, blend further or take some off.

Put foundation on by pressing rather than rubbing, so that the primer stays where you placed it. Because the tint does some of the evening out, a lighter foundation, or a thinner layer of your usual one, is often enough. Strong local redness, a blemish or a broken vein, still needs a corrector or a concealer over the primer: the primer is for the general cast, not the single mark. Some are sold for wearing alone, going on green and blending to beige; on a day without foundation, that is the lightest correction there is.

A colour-correcting primer evens a cast; it does not cover. On its own it leaves the skin a shade more even and still visibly itself, which is why it is almost always worn under something. Nor does it change the skin beneath it. Redness that comes and goes with heat, exercise or a glass of wine will come and go under the primer too, and the primer only softens how it looks.

Tints also behave differently on different skin. Green, the strongest of the correcting colours, can look ashy on medium and deep skin even when it is well blended, and for dullness or uneven patches on deeper skin, peach and orange tints are the usual choice. Test a colour-correcting primer the way you would test a foundation: on the jaw, in daylight, with your usual base pressed on top, because that is how it will be seen.

Colour chosen to change how the skin looks, rather than to match it, has an early chapter in Japan. In 1917 Shiseido sold a face powder in seven colours, white, yellow, flesh-yellow, green, rose, peony and purple, at a time when white powder was the norm, and buyers chose among them by their own colouring and the occasion. According to the company’s heritage staff, citing historical records, the green and the purple were favoured by the geisha of Shinbashi, because they looked well under electric light.^[1]

In Western base make-up, green long stayed a specialist’s colour. A trade article on foundation formulas noted in 2013 that small amounts of chromium oxide green are used “only in special cases, e.g., camouflage products”.^[2] Yet chromium oxide greens are the colouring in several of the primers below, and they are permitted in cosmetics applied to the skin in the United States, the area around the eyes included, under a rule published in July 1977.^[3] The colour-correcting primer puts that specialist’s green into an everyday step.

In Japan the tinted base never went away. Shiseido’s make-up artists still name bases tinted to even out the skin’s colour as one type of keshō shitaji, the make-up base, beside bases that control texture and oil.^[4] When the first colour-correcting primer reached a Western counter is not well recorded. The principle, one colour laid down to change what shows through another, is the old one.