Stick concealer

Stick concealer is the most solid form the product takes: pigment held in a base with enough wax to stand up in a twist-up case, so it can be drawn straight across a spot without a brush or a pot. Its texture runs from creamy sticks that soften on contact, through drier matte ones, to translucent gel sticks that grip with far less wax, but all of them lay down a lot of pigment in one pass.

That makes a stick the natural tool for small, fixed targets: a spot, a mark, redness at the side of the nose, a scar. It is less suited to the under-eye, where a firm texture drags on thin skin and a thick layer creases. Beside a cream concealer in a pot it is tidier and travels better; beside a liquid it is less flexible, but covers more for the same touch.

Choose by texture first. A creamy stick blends more easily and can be used lightly under the eyes; a matte one lasts longer on oily skin and the centre of the face, but can look dry on flaky patches. Gel sticks are lighter and more translucent, covering by blur rather than weight. Some sticks come double-ended, one shade matched to the skin and a lighter one for the eyes, which settles the question of carrying two.

Shade matters more in a stick than almost anywhere else, because it goes on single spots in plain view: it should match the skin, or the foundation, around the mark exactly. A lighter stick on a spot turns it into a pale dot. If you want to brighten under the eyes, use a separate, lighter product there rather than the stick you keep for blemishes.

Shade ranges for concealer sticks vary widely: some houses make dozens of shades, others three. Check the lightest and deepest ends of a range before settling on a formula, and judge undertone as well as depth. A stick that is right in depth but too pink or too ashy shows as a patch on the very spot it was meant to hide. Several houses, Black Opal and Black Radiance among them, build their complexion ranges around deeper skin and are worth seeking out for that alone.

If no single stick matches, a shade with the right undertone and a little too much depth looks more natural than one of the right depth and the wrong undertone. Two neighbouring shades can also be warmed together on the back of the hand and pressed on as one.

If the stick feels stiff, warm the tip for a moment on the back of the hand. Then touch it directly onto the blemish, or take a little onto a small buffing brush for more control, and press rather than rub: rubbing lifts pigment off the centre, the one place it is needed. Blend only the outer edge into the surrounding skin with a fingertip or the brush, leave the centre alone, and set it with a little powder.

On a raised spot, cover the colour and accept the shape; building a thick layer only makes a bump more visible. And because a stick touches the skin directly, it picks up oil from every spot it covers. Wipe the tip with a tissue after use, keep the cap on, and do not share it.

The stick came down from the stage. Actors had mixed pigment into grease for decades, but on the historian James Bennett’s account it was the opera singer Ludwig Leichner, who set up a makeup business in Berlin in 1873, who first made a commercial product of it, and he made it in sticks: thick ones for the base, thinner ones called liners for shadows, highlights and lines.^[1] Some writers traced greasepaint further back, to wig-paste, the flesh-coloured mixture used to hide the join between an actor’s wig and forehead. Carl Baudin of the Leipzig State Theatre had sold one made of zinc, ochre and lard, and a writer in 1899 could call grease paints identical with it, the flesh colour known as No. 3 and sold in sticks.^[1] Stage makeup in sticks, in other words, was already concealing something.

The earliest concealer stick for the street that Bennett records came from camouflage makeup. In 1936 Lydia O’Leary, who made the Covermark cover cream for birthmarks and scars, added Spot-Stik to her range, produced and packaged like a lipstick, for the occasional pimple or minor blemish.^[2] Max Factor then put a whole base in a lipstick case: Pan-Stik, a creamy makeup in stick form introduced in 1947 and sold to the public from 1948, was wound up, dabbed on and blended with the fingertips, and advertised as needing no puff or sponge and unable to spill or leak in a purse. The same firm’s Erace, launched in 1954, is often called the first stick concealer; it was not, Spot-Stik having preceded it by eighteen years.^[3] Erace arrived in the same year as Charles Antell’s Touch-Up Stik and Westmore’s Beauty-Stick, all sold on television, where a tired face could be transformed in seconds, and in 1954 American sales of stick concealers rose from thousands of units to millions, helped by a case that looked like a lipstick and went into a handbag.^[4] A trade recipe of 1957 shows what was inside: castor oil, petrolatum, beeswax, ozokerite and paraffin, carrying titanium dioxide at a quarter of the whole.^[4]