To Catch A Concealer

One day while while blindly wandering the makeup aisles of Nordstrom, I was hit up by a salesperson from the Prescriptives cosmetic counter. Now, I am a fairly easy sell, but I am putty the moment you want to put me in a chair, fawn over me, and do my makeup. This lady offered to do just that.

I was not too familiar with the Prescriptives line, for some reason they name always threw me off and didn't reach out and grab me. But when she started to apply a concealer to my face that covered those dark circles and made it look like I had never had a breakout in my life, I was sold. Let's not forget to add that I bought about $70 worth of other things from this makeup genius. What can I say, you make me look pretty, I buy all your crap.

The concealer is called Flawless Skin Total Protection Concealer, and since I am as white as the ghosts that haunt you at night the color I got was Level 2, Cool. Because I am cool I am assuming. As in awesome. It cost about $17, which is not bad considering that it has lasted me a full and happy year. I have found over the years that dumping your finger into concealer and trying to smear it onto your face is a mistake. I tell you this because of the fact that you end up in pictures with all these sloppily placed dots all over your face. Kind of like a bullseye that says "Hey look where I broke out and tried to cover it!" So I have turned to the Bare Escentuals max coverage concealer brush. I know you are supposed to dip all these things in powder and wah-lah have magic skin, but in my case that didn't really work, so I have been using it for my cream based concealers, and it gets the job done, blending everything quite evenly.

Yesterday my Prescriptives concealer decided that after a long and happy year together that we needed to "have a talk." It was feeling like our time together was well spent, but it had gotten empty after spending every day with me, and it was time to move on. I took it with grace and strength, and decided I could go to the mall and find a new one.

I walked into the same Nordstrom and started to retrace my footsteps as to where that magical makeover had happened one year ago. It was like a dream that was completely and utterly awesome, and you go to find the place in real life and it doesn't exist. I went over to the Clinique counter and asked the saleswoman if she knew where it had been moved to. Turns out that Prescriptives is no more and they are discontinuing the brand. It was met by my cries of protest, and my husband was kind enough to even feel my pain for me by pitching in, "Damned economy!" The Clinique woman was helpful when I explained to her that what I was looking for came in a silver dollar sized container and that it was a thick concealer, not all wet and creamy like the other kinds I have tried but did not work in the past.

She suggested that I try Bobbi Brown or perhaps the MAC counter, and I did my sad shuffle over to the Bobbi Brown counter first. The only thing they had in the way of concealer was the goopy kind, and honestly that has never really done it's job. It is too sheer to cover anything, so I ambled over to MAC, the hardest place to get help in a Nordstrom on a Saturday afternoon. My husband had a Eureka moment when I took him to MAC, telling me that all these years he had heard it, he thought it was just an acronym that girls used for generalizing going to a makeup counter.

I felt a bit shovy as I pushed my way through patrons to start applying multiple concealers to my hand to judge the texture and color of them. Eventually I found one called "Studio Finish Concealer" color is NW20 that looked like it was going to have to be my Prescriptives replacement. One of the associates grabbed a container for me with surprising celerity, I though for sure I would be waiting 20 minutes to get help. I brought it home, and am taking it through the test run today to see if it holds up as well as my past love. It does have SPF 35 in it, and I am a huge advocate of SPF at all times, but make sure you are using a lotion with that amount in it otherwise, I am fearing that I will end up with little concealer sunblock patches on my face. The cost on this one was about $17 as well, and I have to say, that even though that may seem like a lot for a tiny tub of something, the amount of time that it lasts you and the quality of it is key.

In the meantime, I will still continue my hunt via eBay for the Prescriptives concealer in hopes of having just one last fling with it.