Powder bronzer

Powder bronzer is pressed powder in the colours of a tan: warm browns with red and gold in them, sometimes with a fine shimmer, pressed into a cake and swept on with a large brush. It adds the colour the sun would add, in the places the sun would add it — the top of the forehead, the cheekbones, the bridge of the nose and the jaw — so that the face looks as if it has been outdoors rather than made up.

Its nearest neighbour is contour powder, and the two are constantly confused: sold side by side, sometimes in one compact, and sometimes under one name. The difference is temperature. Bronzer is warm and imitates a tan; contour is cool, a greyish brown, and imitates a shadow. Swept into the hollow under the cheekbone, a warm bronzer reads as colour rather than depth and can look muddy; laid on the high points, a contour shade looks grey. Many bronzers are sold as doing both jobs, and on some skin they manage it, but the powder that suits you best is the one chosen for the job you want done.

Choose a bronzer one or two shades deeper than your skin and no more. Too deep and it sits on the face as a patch; too light and it vanishes. Undertone matters as much as depth. On fair skin a soft golden or neutral tan looks like sun, while anything very red or orange looks like makeup. Olive skin usually suits a neutral or slightly rosy brown. Deep skin needs a bronzer with enough depth and richness to show — a warm red-brown or a deep copper — and a pale, ashy powder will simply turn grey on it. Test a shade on the cheekbone rather than the wrist, and judge it by a window: a bronzer that reads as a tan in daylight will read as one outdoors.

Then the finish. A matte bronzer is the most versatile: it can go all over the face, it does not catch on texture, and it suits skin that shines. A satin or demi-matte powder has a faint sheen that softens without sparkling. A shimmer or luminous bronzer reflects light and is best kept to the high points, where it doubles as a warm highlighter. Many people keep two: a matte to warm the whole face and a luminous one for summer.

Bronzer goes on after foundation and any setting powder; powder laid on a damp base grabs and streaks. Use a large, soft brush — a fluffy dome or a flat-topped kabuki — tap off the excess, and sweep a loose figure 3 down each side of the face: across the temple, under the cheekbone and along the jaw. Keep the colour where the light falls and the sun would land, and go lightly towards the centre of the face. A smaller tapered brush gives more control across the nose and at the temples.

Build in thin layers and look in daylight between them. Finish by running what is left on the brush down the neck and over the ears, so that the face does not end at the jaw. The common mistakes are a stripe where the brush first landed, an orange cast from the wrong undertone and a face darker than the neck; a clean brush, or a light dusting of translucent powder, softens all three. For a bronze that lasts, press on a cream bronzer first and a powder of a similar shade on top.

Bronzer exists because the tan changed sides. In the eighteenth century a brown face was the mark of outdoor work; in the twentieth, as leisure moved outdoors, particularly for women, it came to mean the opposite, and after the 1920s a summer colour suggested someone with time for tennis and the beach.^[1] The change is usually handed to one woman. It is often said that Coco Chanel came back brown from the Riviera in the early 1920s and made the tan fashionable, and a line is attributed to her — “The 1929 girl must be tanned” — that even careful popular histories repeat without saying where she said it.^[1] Writing in History Today, Robert Mighall calls the Chanel legend “the classic urban myth it is”.^[2] The shift in taste is well recorded; the single woman at its origin is not.

The cosmetics trade followed the fashion rather than starting it. The rise of sunbathing from the 1920s brought creams and oils to prevent sunburn and help a tan along, and face powder followed the skin: by the end of the 1930s Lenthéric was selling its Poudre Orkilia in shades such as Ocre and Bronzée, some of them made for suntanned skin, a vogue that had grown through the decade.^[3] The bronzing powder as a product in its own right is usually dated much later. Guerlain launched Terracotta in 1984, and a research director at its parent company told a magazine in 2021 that “the concept of a bronzing powder simply did not exist prior to 1984”.^[4] That is the company’s claim of a first, and the tinted powders of half a century earlier complicate it. Whoever came first, the idea has not changed since: a tan kept in a compact, put on in a minute and washed off at night.