Powder blush

Powder blush is face powder with more colour in it. The base is the same fine, slippery mineral powder, but the pigment load is higher, and opacifiers such as zinc oxide and titanium dioxide are added so the colour reads over a made-up face.^[1] A binder holds the mixture together and a press turns it into the cake in the pan.^[1] The cake has to be firm enough to survive a handbag and soft enough to give up its colour to a brush.

It is the most forgiving form of blush. It goes on last, over foundation and powder, so it cannot disturb the base beneath it; it builds in thin layers and softens under a clean brush; and it holds up on skin that makes its own oil. What it gives up, against cream and liquid blush, is the look of colour coming from under the skin. On very dry skin it can sit on the surface rather than sinking in.

The finish decides where a powder blush can go. A matte formula has no shimmer and reads purely as colour, which makes it the safest choice for textured skin and for the apples of the cheeks. A satin one has a faint sheen that softens the edge. A shimmer finish carries reflective particles, flatters smooth skin on the high point of the cheekbone and shows every pore on the apple, so it is better treated as blush and highlighter at once.

Choose colour by depth before undertone. Soft pinks and peaches suit fair skin; roses, corals and berries a middle range; and deep berries, bricks and plums dark skin, on which pale pinks can look chalky. The quickest test is the flush your own cheeks make after a walk in the cold: the shade that matches it rarely looks wrong. Pigment strength varies more than the pans suggest, so tap the brush against the edge of the compact before it touches the face.

The reds and pinks come from iron oxides, which are still used in cosmetics, from synthetic colours, and sometimes from carmine, the red of the cochineal insect.^[2] Since 2011 a cosmetic sold in the United States has had to name carmine on its label, which is the place to look for anyone who avoids ingredients of animal origin.^[3]

Load a brush lightly, tap off the excess and start where the colour should be strongest: the apple of the cheek for a fresh, rounded look, or just below the cheekbone for a longer, lifted one. Sweep back towards the ear in small movements rather than one stroke, and stop short of the nose. A round, fluffy brush diffuses the colour widely and forgives a heavy hand; an angled brush follows the bone and places it more precisely. Draping, which carries blush up towards the temple, uses the same brush in a longer curve.

Apply it over a base that has been set, not over wet foundation or cream, where powder grabs and goes patchy. If there is too much, go over it with a clean brush or a light dusting of translucent powder rather than wiping it. For long days, a cream blush underneath and a powder of a similar shade pressed over it lasts longer than either alone.

Blush was called rouge for most of its history, and for most of that history the difficulty was the red. The first carmine used in Europe came from a Polish scale insect; after the Spanish conquest of the Americas it was largely replaced by cheaper carmine from the cochineal insect of Mexico and Central America. Safflower, madder, alkanet, brazilwood and sandalwood supplied vegetable reds, while red lead and vermilion, both poisonous, supplied cheap mineral ones. In the United States the mineral reds lasted until the 1920s, when they were prohibited by law.^[4]

Dry rouge was the simplest form: pigment ground into talc or French chalk. A recipe printed in 1875 needed only carmine, a little almond oil and chalk.^[4] Loose powder rouge never became popular, though; most women preferred theirs compressed into a compact.^[4] The first compact rouges were pastes moulded by hand into small shallow containers and dried, a method French houses such as Bourjois used through the nineteenth century; they gave way to cakes made in a mechanical press, which became the most popular form of rouge and the hardest to make well.^[4] The same methods made compact face powder, and by 1925 the case itself was being called a compact.^[5] A Tre-Jur vanity case of 1924 held compact powder, a smaller rouge compact and a lipstick together: the made-up face as one object in a handbag.^[4]

The twentieth century changed the colours more than the cake. Synthetic reds such as geranium lake, eosine, erythrosine and phloxine widened the shades a rouge could come in.^[4] After the Second World War the word changed too: new stick rouges were sold as blushers, and by 1978 Maybelline was selling a Fingertip Powder Blush.^[4] Sales did not follow the name. James Bennett, whose Cosmetics and Skin traces the trade literature, finds that rouge never grew after the war as other cosmetics did, because the fashion for a tan had largely ended the peaches-and-cream complexion it was made for.^[4] What lasted was the object: a pressed cake in a shallow pan, set into a case with a mirror, which is how powder blush is still sold.