Estee Lauder Double Wear

It's not often I'm a negative Nelly but today is one of those days. I know so many of you consider Double Wear to be your Holy Grail of foundations, so a few weeks back on the hunt for something with a bit more coverage I decided to swing by the Estee Lauder Counter and pick up a bottle.

I'll start with the pros. I personally think the shade range is amazing, being ghostly pale I usually struggle with finding a good choice of paler shades but Estee Lauder seems to have it covered and Ivory Nude seemed like the perfect choice. I also quite liked the coverage. I didn't find it to be  as full as I was expecting, and some pesky blemishes did need a blob of concealer but it does a good job of covering any redness and generally smoothing things over. Lasting power is also pretty good, I can put this on before work and when I get home 9 hours later it's still looking okay but it does start to get a little patchy after the 9 hour mark. It also  controls oil pretty well but I do find it needs a tiny bit of powder around my t-zone part way through the day.

That is unfortuatnely where the good points end. I found that double wear had a tendency to accentuate any dry bits and cling to dry patches making them look 10 times worse. I know it's a long wear foundation and I find these can be a bit drying sometimes but I still haven't encountered one that made my dryer bits looks quite so bad. I also thought it made my complexion look incredibly dull, even if I applied it as minimally as possible it still looked awful on me. I also found it quite hard to work with, it seemed super fast drying and difficult to blend in too.

The worst part for me though is how it has made me break out. I know everyone's skin is different and what works well for one person isn't forced to work well for the next but this foundation has made a complete mess of my face. My skin feels so congested and I've had spots in places that I've never had spots in my life. It's made my skin bumpy, spotty, congested and generally just red and angry. It unfortunately took me a while to realise that it was Double Wear that was causing this skin nightmare but it has definitely been relegated to the bottom of my make up drawer and it won't be coming out again any time soon.

For such an expensive foundation I am incredibly disappointed.