Loose setting powder

Loose setting powder is face powder that has not been pressed into a cake: a dry, fine powder laid over foundation and concealer to take up oil, take down shine and hold the base where it was put. Most are built on talc, silica or a starch, sometimes with a little mica for sheen, and they come in two broad kinds. A translucent powder is close to colourless on the skin, whatever it looks like in the jar; a tinted one carries a little pigment, to match the skin, warm it or brighten it.

It sits between its neighbours. Pressed powder is the same idea bound into a compact so that it can travel; loose powder has no binder, so it goes on lighter and finer, which is why it is the one used at home and backstage. Powder foundation and loose mineral foundation are made to cover; a setting powder is made to be hardly seen. And where a setting spray fixes a face with a thin film, powder works by absorbing, so it mattifies as it sets.

A translucent powder is the easy default on light and medium skin, because it sets without changing the colour of the base. On deeper skin, some powders sold as translucent leave a pale, ashy veil, most visibly under the eyes; a tinted powder in your own depth, or one made for deep skin, avoids it. Banana or yellow powders are a third kind, sold to brighten the under-eye and take the edge off purple shadow, and they suit light to medium skin best.

Then choose the finish. A matte powder absorbs most, and suits oily skin, heat and long days. A soft-focus powder, often silica-based, is sold as blurring pores and texture by scattering light. A radiant powder adds a fine sheen for dry skin that looks dull under matte formulas. One caution applies to the whitest powders: laid on thickly, some show as a white cast in flash photographs, so test with a phone’s flash before a photographed evening.

How you apply loose powder matters as much as which one you buy. Tip a little into the lid rather than dipping into the jar, work it into the puff or brush, and tap off the excess before it touches your face. A velour puff, pressed and rolled over the skin, sets most firmly: use it where the base has to last, over concealer and across the forehead, nose and chin. A large, soft brush sweeps on a thinner veil, and is the tool for the cheeks and for dusting off afterwards.

“Baking” is the heavy version: a thick layer pressed under the eyes, or wherever concealer creases, left for a few minutes to set, then swept away. It gives a crisp, very matte finish that lasts, and on dry or finely lined skin it can look dry. For most days a thin press is enough. Powder where the face shines or creases, and leave the rest of the skin alone.

Loose powder has no water in it and keeps for a long time; the puff is what needs care. Wash a velour puff every week or two in mild soap and let it dry completely. Close the sifter between uses and tape it shut for travel. To get powder through the holes, tap the closed jar on the table rather than shaking it open-side down.

Face powder is far older than the setting powder. Pulverised rice starch was used on the face in China, Japan and elsewhere in East Asia before it reached the West, and when poudre de riz became a cosmetic in Europe has not been established.^[1] Its tiny grains felt smooth and gave the skin a soft bloom, but by the late nineteenth century the name was worth more than the ingredient. Examining face powders in 1897, the physician William Murrell found that those commonly used “no longer consisted of powdered rice, but were combinations in various proportions of chalk, white lead, bismuth, common starch, and alabaster”; one sold as Poudre de Riz de Java contained no rice at all.^[1][2]

White lead was the danger in the box. In Japan, where lead-based oshiroi was widely used from the Edo period, children were poisoned through the powdered skin of their wet nurses, and the collapse in 1887 of the celebrated onnagata Nakamura Fukusuke, diagnosed as chronic lead poisoning, made it a public scandal. An ordinance of 1900 banned harmful colourants but exempted white powder until a substitute existed, and lead powder was finally outlawed by an ordinance of 1930, which ended its manufacture at the close of 1933.^[3] In Western powders, starch gave way to minerals: talc for slip, zinc oxide — at first regarded with suspicion — for covering power, and from the early 1930s titanium dioxide, three to four times as effective a cover as zinc.^[1][2]

Then came a race for fineness. In the 1930s Lady Esther’s advertisements urged women to bite their powder to test it for grit, and in 1934 Coty secured the exclusive rights to a process that milled powder in air-driven “micronisers”, selling the result as Air Spun and leaving its familiar box, with its pattern of powder puffs, unchanged.^[4] As cake and liquid make-up took over the work of covering, some makers made their loose powders colourless, to take away shine rather than add colour; the first known to the historian James Bennett is Westmore’s Overglo, introduced in 1944.^[2] That is the translucent powder in the jar today. Coty’s Air Spun, in a plastic tub now, is still on sale beside it.^[4]