Well this is a nifty little number: a non-cakey, long-lasting, matte-but-not-flat foundation that comes in at less than seven quid. I don’t usually get on with a lot of the cheaper foundations, but the L’Oreal Paris Infallible Matte applied and blended beautifully on me and left my skin looking perfected, but not “masked over”.
I must point out that this is not for those who have dry skin – even remotely. My skin has been drier during pregnancy, but it’s still not what I would called dry, not by any stretch of the imagination, and I can hazard a guess that the Infallible 24H-Matte wouldn’t blend nearly as nicely on skin that had dry patches or a texture that liked to soak up product! My skin was actually prepped with moisturiser and a bit of primer (Laura Mercier’s Radiance, because I wanted to demonstrate the mattifying abilities of the foundation), so it was well greased up…
Here’s my skin before the foundation. Laura Mercier’s Radiance Primer (£29 here) is one of the most ridiculously glowy on the market – I wanted to see what the Infallible would cover up, in terms of shine. And yes I know that this is fake shine, not real, oil-from-the-pores shine, but we’ll get to that later. Here’s my skin after very lightly blending in a small amount of the L’Oreal Paris Infallible foundation:
You can hopefully see that any trace of robot face has been eradicated. In terms of coverage, I wouldn’t say that Infallible is a full, heavy coverage – it’s medium, but a very good medium. If you had very red marks or blemishes, I think that it would struggle and you’d need to do a bit of targeted concealing, but to be quite honest I prefer this approach. There’s nothing worse than seeing a face caked in what looks like an inch of foundation, and some face bases just look caked on because they are so unbelievably heavy. It’s always better to have a lighter hand and layer up where you need more help.
Some skin close-ups. “Before”, above, wearing just the Laura Mercier primer, and “after”, below, with one light coat of the Infallible 24H-Matte.
You can see if you look at the mole to the right of my nose that the colour of it has been reduced in intensity and that my dark circles have had the edge taken off – personally, I wouldn’t really apply concealer over the top of this because that’s good enough coverage for me. I’m happy with a bit of reality peeking through! In terms of shininess, it has been all but obliterated. And in terms of real shine, the stuff that happens towards the end of a long day, it handled that pretty well too.
There was no shiny nose or forehead and the colour pigment seemed to stick on well into the evening. Despite that, there seems to be a nice reflectiveness to the finish of this foundation – not a glow, exactly, but a bit of a radiance, like the one you get from Chanel’s Perfection Lumiere Velvet. I’ve tried it with and without various primers and the finish always seems to be the same. Very good, and all for £6.99. I don’t have extremely oily skin, though, so if anyone has and would like to feedback on this foundation, please add your comments below!
You can find the L’Oreal Paris Infallible Matte Foundation at Boots.com here for £6.99. I wore shade 11, “Vanilla”.
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