L'Oreal Studio Secrets Professional Color Correcting Primer: Green for Anti-Redness

I have pretty rosy cheeks. I have my super fair, anglo-saxon mother to thank for that. It's a bit of a pain, and part of the reason I've never really gotten into blushers. For years and years, I just dealt with it. Then I found color correcting primers. Were my prayers answered?

look at all my freckles!

I used to use Smashbox Photo Finish primer in green. It worked well enough, but I didn't feel like it cut the red that much. I wanted more. I saw a review online for the L'oreal stuff, and decided I had to try it.

Here is me, bare faced. I have two fairly uneven red patches on my cheeks. It's not as bad as some folks have, but it's all I can see when I look at my face in the mirror.

it might be too early to be taking pictures of my head

Here is my face. 50% covered in primer. You can definitely see that the red it significantly less pronounced. This stuff actually does what it says it does. It doesn't feel like the silicone primers I'm used to, and definitely doesn't spread like one. It also claims to be "illuminating"...which means it has sparkle. A fair amount of it. The first time I used it, I thought I was having some major fall-out issues with my eyeshadow. It's not shimmer, it's microglitter.

L: straight primer
R: bare faced

handy divider to see the difference

There is just one major problem with this stuff. It's quite opaque, which is good for cutting the redness. But it also settles into pores and gives you tiny mint-green polka dots.  Not exactly the "flawless" look I was going for. There are two ways to solve this: either put regular primer on underneath this primer, or cut it with something.

freckles...again! Also, green microdots that are now
my pores. Hooray?

I generally choose to cut it with another primer, Lanacane Anti-Chafing Gel in this case. It works near-as-well as any silicone primer, and it's far cheaper. I don't want to waste the good stuff for things like this.

I think this tube was maybe $7 at Target

I generally use a 1:1 ratio, depending on how red my skin is

Cutting it does lessen the red fighting power, but it gives you a much better finish. There is 100% less green polkadots on the mixed side of my face. By mixing the anti-chafing gel and the green primer, I get a finish that is damned close to the Smashbox stuff...for about 1/2 the cost.

On days that the mix doesn't kill the red to my satisfaction, I will layer this over a regular primer. Then I get the skin-smoothing benefits of the regular stuff, and the redness-murdering power of this L'Oreal stuff.

with the handy labels

all done, quite a bit less red than when I started.
Though I think that a red shirt was possible a bad
idea to wear for this particular demonstration.

The tl:dr on this is: it's a really good redness-reducing primer...if you don't have large pores. If you do, it's still good at killing the red, but it needs help. This stuff would get an A+ if it didn't have that damned glitter! You can get it at Target, Walmart, CVS, Rite Aid, or Ulta.