Pressed highlighter

Pressed highlighter is a powder made to do the opposite of what face powder was invented for. A setting powder scatters light to hide shine; a highlighter sends it back. The shine comes from effect pigments: thin, flat platelets, most often mica coated with titanium dioxide or iron oxide, which reflect and refract light much as the layers of a pearl do. Synthetic mica, glass flakes and bismuth oxychloride play the same part in some formulas.^[1] The platelets are mixed with a slippery base powder and a little oil or binder, and pressed into a pan.

The size of the platelets decides the finish. Fine ones give a soft sheen; larger ones catch the light as visible sparkle.^[1] That is most of the difference between a highlighter that looks like skin in daylight and one that looks like makeup. Its neighbours differ in form more than in purpose: a baked highlighter is made wet and dried, and can hold more shimmer; a loose one has no binder at all; a cream or liquid one melts into the skin instead of resting on it. Pressed powder is the easiest of them to control, because it goes on last, over a finished base, and builds in thin layers.

Finish runs from luminous or satin, a sheen with no visible particles, through shimmer, which glints as the face moves, to metallic or foiled powders that look almost wet. The softer the finish, the more forgiving it is. Open pores, fine lines and dry patches all show more under sparkle, because each particle sits on the surface and marks it; on smooth skin, or for evenings and photographs, the stronger finishes read well from a distance.

Choose the shade by the depth of your skin first. Pearl, champagne and pale pink suit fair skin; gold, peach and soft bronze a middle range; deep gold, copper, bronze and rose-gold dark skin, on which pale, silvery highlighters can sit as a grey or chalky film. Undertone comes second: a pinker highlight flatters cool skin, a golden one warm. A highlighter should look like light falling on skin, so test a stripe on the cheekbone and look at it by a window, not a swatch on the back of the hand.

Highlight goes where light would fall on the face anyway: the top of the cheekbone, the bridge of the nose, the centre of the cupid’s bow, the brow bone and, lightly, the inner corner of the eye. Load a small tapered brush or a fan brush, tap off the excess, and sweep or press a narrow band along the top of the cheekbone, from about the outer edge of the iris towards the temple. Keep it above the blush rather than on it; on the apple of the cheek, shine finds every pore. A fan brush gives the lightest, most diffuse result, a tapered brush a narrower one, and a fingertip, pressing the powder in, the most intense of the three.

Apply it over a base that has been set, so it glides rather than grabs, and build slowly: two light passes look like skin, one heavy pass looks like powder. A damp brush gives a stronger, more metallic result, and the same powder pressed over a cream highlighter is more intense than either alone. Where skin is oily, keep the shine to the upper cheekbone and away from the nose and forehead, which will make their own by the afternoon.

Highlighting began as a matter of light and dark, not shine. In the mid-1930s Perc Westmore, head of make-up at Warner Brothers–First National, devised what he called corrective make-up on the rule cameramen used when lighting a face: light brings a feature forward and shade makes it recede. A broad nose was thinned by painting its ridge with a lighter greasepaint than the base and its sides with a darker one — “highlighting places that are undesirably recessed or concave, shadowing unpleasant protuberances”, as he put it in 1935.^[2] Shine itself was the enemy. Under the brighter lights that Technicolor needed, the slight sheen of greasepaint picked up colour from the scenery, and Max Factor’s Pan-Cake, first used on a feature in 1937, was made to overcome it.^[3]

Putting a pearly sheen into a powder took chemistry. Bismuth oxychloride, made in the laboratory from the 1930s with larger, more lustrous crystals, could be used dry, and so allowed pearlescent effects in face powders; titanium dioxide coated on mica, described in 1942, became widely available in the 1960s.^[4] In 1959 Richard Hudnut was selling a Cloudsilk Pearled Face Powder.^[4] In 1966 Max Factor launched Geminesse, a department-store line promising “beauty illusions of highlights, contour and shadow”, with a trio of highlights and shadows and five “light-reflective” pressed powders.^[5]

Half a century after Geminesse, highlighter had become a product category in its own right. The NPD Group, which measures prestige beauty sales in the United States, reported that makeup’s growth in 2017 came partly from “other face products such as bronzers, highlighters, and glow products”.^[6] A pressed highlighter holds both halves of that history: the light the film studios painted on, and the pearl that took so long to get into a compact.