Colour corrector

A colour corrector is a concealer that has stopped trying to match the skin. It is made in the colour that cancels another: peach, apricot, orange or red over the blue-grey of under-eye shadow and dark marks; green over redness; lavender over a sallow, yellowish cast; yellow over faint purple. The principle is the colour wheel’s. Opposite colours laid over one another dull each other towards a neutral grey-brown, so a thin layer of the right opposite takes the strength out of a discolouration before anything covers it. Most correctors are dense creams in small pots; many now are liquids with a wand, and some are twist-up sticks.

That makes it a different tool from its neighbours. A concealer matches the skin and covers; a corrector changes a colour and is almost always covered in turn, by concealer or foundation. A colour-correcting primer is a sheer tint spread over the whole face, and a CC cream does a gentler version of the same job everywhere. A colour-correcting palette holds several correctors side by side. A single corrector does one job, strongly, in one place.

Choose by the colour you are cancelling and by the depth of your skin. For blue or purple under-eye shadow, the usual choice is peach or salmon on light skin, apricot or orange on medium and olive skin, and a deeper orange or red on deep skin, where a pale peach turns grey. The same warm shades take the blue out of visible veins and the grey out of some dark marks. Green is for redness: a blemish, broken capillaries, the flush around the nostrils. Yellow is the gentler choice for mild redness or light purple, and lavender or violet lifts sallowness, sparingly, since it brightens as well as corrects.

A corrector that suits you makes the area look neutral, not coloured. If a peach leaves a grey patch, it is too light for your skin; if the green shows through your concealer, there is too much of it. Judge it in daylight, from an ordinary distance.

The form changes how a corrector behaves. A cream in a pot is the densest and gives the most correction for the least product, which suits deep shadow and strong redness; warm it on the hand first, or it drags. A liquid with a wand is thinner and easier to sheer out, and suits a wider area under the eye, though it takes a steadier hand to keep it off skin that does not need it. A stick is the quickest, drawn straight onto a spot, and a stain sets as it dries, so the concealer laid over it does not move it about. For fine lines or dry skin under the eyes, a liquid or a creamy formula with some slip creases less than a firm cream.

Put it on after skincare and any primer, and before concealer. Use very little. Warm a dot on the back of the hand, then press it only onto the discolouration — the darkest crescent under the eye, often near the inner corner, or the red spot itself rather than the skin around it — with a fingertip or a small, flat brush, and pat the edges out. Give it a minute to settle.

Then cover it. Pat concealer or foundation over the top rather than wiping, which drags the corrector away or smears it into the skin beside it. A light press of powder sets the layers if they tend to crease. Most mistakes are of quantity: a thick layer of green shows as grey through anything, and peach spread across the whole under-eye leaves a warm band where there was no shadow to cancel. Where the discolouration is mild, leave the corrector out: a well-matched concealer, or one a shade warmer, does the job in a single layer.

Cancelling one colour with another is older than the product. A British beauty manual of 1936 advised any woman whose face was apt to flush and become very red to “try using a green powder. It will not look so startling as it may sound”, recommending it for hiding a red nose or the tiny red veins that sometimes show under the skin.^[1]

The corrector as a cream came later, as the neutralising concealer: in the historian James Bennett’s summary, a concealer in the complementary colour of the blemish, green to neutralise redness and yellow for purple blotches. The make-up artist Marvin G. Westmore, son of the make-up artist Monte Westmore, traced the idea back to the 1920s, but he did not recommend it for everyday use. Mixing opposite colours, he wrote in 2001, creates only “a third color”, which “must then be concealed with a color that matches the skin, which adds an extra step and additional thickness to the makeup”.^[2]

His objection is still the fairest test of a corrector. It earns its place when it lets a thinner layer of concealer do the work; when it needs more concealer to hide it than the shadow did, it is the wrong shade, or too much of it. When correctors moved from make-up artists’ kits onto ordinary shop shelves is a question the sources read here do not answer.