Hey lovelies,
How is your week going? I'm having one of those weeks where I keep thinking it's a completely different day of the week than what it is T_T Mike was away all weekend and home from work on Monday so I think that is what skewing with my sense of time, my routine went wacky!
Anyway, aside from mixing up the days of the week, I've been wrapping up several reviews! Today I'll be showing you the cult favourite of many New Zealand woman, Moisture Mist's Beauty Cake foundation.
Moisture Mist is a Shiseido brand specially formulated for New Zealand women. I really enjoy quite a few of Shiseido's other brands - and there are A LOT to choose from! In New Zealand alone we have Shiseido, Moisture Mist, NARS (yes, NARS!) and ZA, while overseas there's Maquillage, Majolica Majorca, Clé de Peau, Bare Escentuals and more.
Back to Moisture Mist though - it's been on New Zealand shelves for over 30 years. I remember buying my first concealer, Moisture Mist Circle Litener, and a DIY Face Colour palette in my teens and feeling rather flash. Here's a wee gripe though - the packaging format hasn't changed at all in the ten years since my first Moisture Mist purchase, and I think it could stand to be refreshed. When it's competing with the sleeker, more modern packaging of other brands housed in Farmers and the pharmacies that stock Moisture Mist, it's very easy for a visual person like myself to skip over it and head for the shiny things. This is of course only my personal opinion - if you like this packaging, good on you! But in my case I think the dated packaging does the product inside a disservice.
Enough about the packaging and onto the contents inside! Let's take a look at the Beauty Cake!
The Beauty Cake foundation has a RRP of $35NZD, while the sponge is sold separately for $13. You can also purchase Beauty Cake refills for $29 when you're running low, which is rather handy. Another blogger also reviewed the Beauty Cake recently and several people remarked that they felt the sponge should come with the foundation, particularly for that price. On the one hand, I can understand why people would feel a sponge designed to work with a specific foundation should be partnered with it, but on the other hand, you wouldn't expect the majority of the foundations you purchase to come with their own brush or sponge, so it's not something that bothers me terribly. I do think it's great that the sponge can be purchased separately in any case, as it would be very frustrating needing to buy a whole new set if something happened to your sponge!
I've touched on the aesthetics of the packaging above, so I won't discuss that further, but the compact itself is a decent weight and feels very sturdy. The Beauty Cake itself is by all appearances a powder, but once you've wet it with the sponge it becomes a very firm cream. It's soft enough that you can push a finger in and it will make a shallow dent, but a bit firmer than say, the Almay Shadow Softies (not that I own any after the rather dubious reviews, but I can't resist squishing the testers at Farmers. If you don't do that next time you go to Farmers after reading this, well... I just don't know what to think.) Because it's very firm, I didn't find it possible to pick up enough product on my finger to get a good arm swatch with.
Applying the Beauty Cake foundation took a bit of getting used to, and I found that because the foundation itself is very compactly packed, it took a few applications for it to soften a little. Once I'd worn it in, as it were, application became much quicker and easier. You can control the opacity by using the sponge very damp (for lighter coverage) or slightly damp (for fuller coverage). Finding the right balance there took a bit of getting used to as well! I wouldn't call this a full coverage foundation by any stretch; it's medium at best.
A closer look at the Beauty Cake sponge. It comes with its own pouch to keep it clean and away from your other beauty products while the holes still allow the sponge to dry out.
The sponge is soft but not flimsy and is very easy to use. The slanted egg shape allows you to apply the foundation to all the contours of your face.
Wearing Honey alone.
Honey is the lightest shade in the range and unfortunately it's too dark and pink for me (for reference, I wear MAC NC15). As you can see, the coverage is medium and it doesn't do much to cover redness, but it does feel very light on and it isn't visibly powdery or dry looking.
After adding concealer, highlighter, blush and bronzer, plus eye makeup and lippy.
Honey was more passable after adding the rest of my makeup, but still visibly pink and not at all the colour of my neck. It's a real shame that there isn't a shade in the range that matches me because I did really enjoy wearing this foundation (despite being a bit worried people would notice the mismatched colour). I expected it to accentuate dryness over the course of the day but it didn't at all.
See details of this FOTD here
I was seriously impressed by the wear time of the Beauty Cake! I took a photo at the end of the day (pink stripey dressing gown, huzzah!) and you can see that it's mostly intact, only really coming away from my chin which I am guilty of touching often. I've used flash in this photo and it's not showing any awful flashback, one less thing to worry about!
Overall, I like it, but I'd like it more if there was a shade that suited me!
- Buildable light-medium coverage
- Doesn't accentuate dryness
- Long wearing
- Doesn't flash back in photos
- Feels very lightweight on the skin
- Doesn't provide as much coverage as I'd like
- A wider shade range would be great
- Selected pharmacies and Farmers stores in New Zealand - see stockists
Have you tried the Moisture Mist Beauty Cake?
X
Lani
I agree about the packaging - they do look pretty dated. I'd been walking past their stands my whole life and never thought to even look at them. I also struggled with the shade range, selecting one that was a touch too dark. Great thorough review :)
ReplyDeleteThanks Lena!
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