Review: Laura Mercier Secret Camouflage Concealer

Laura Mercier's Secret Camouflage is a bit of a cult product, unfailingly recommended by magazines and often a winner in beauty awards.  Recently, I arranged to swap for one in the lightest shade, SC1 - the hefty £25 price tag wasn't something I was prepared to pay without a cheaper trial period.

Read on to see how I got on.




 Inside the fairly large container, you get two pans of concealer; one in a shade to match the skin's undertone, and one to match the skin's depth of colour (whatever that means!).  In theory, this means that you can custom blend your own perfect colour with room for variance due to seasonal changes.  I do think that since this is a selling point for the product, there should be a little bit of space for actually mixing the product; in its current form you can either use a corner of one of the pans, or the back of your hand, which is a little wasteful to my mind.

On to the product itself - it's thick.  And surprisingly solid!  I carefully worked my brush into the left hand pan (which is a perfect blue-neutralising warmish shade for my undereye circles) and ended up overapplying the first time I tried it out.  The concealer is very highly pigmented and you really only need the smallest amount on the brush to give good coverage; too much will cake, settle into lines, and generally not look particularly secret.

Once I'd worked a very small amount over my dark circles and set with a little powder (I like a very matte look for my face, and any shine under the eyes looks strange), I found that all the darkness was effectively covered, and in a natural looking fashion too.  Above, you can see a fairly close up photo of my undereye area.  For such a thick product, it looks surprisingly light on the skin.  As it is so dry, I've applied it over an emollient eye cream and a touch of foundation; as I don't suffer from dry under-eye skin the thick texture doesn't overemphasise any crepey-ness, which it might be more liable to do if your under eye area is less than very well moisturised.

I didn't take any photos of how it applied over blemishes (that'd be oversharing, I feel!) but again, a very small amount blended in carefully completely concealed without caking.  I do feel that a brush is essential; applying this with your fingertips is likely to result in over application, particularly as the product isn't particularly emollient and needs careful blending.

Overall, I'm pretty impressed - and it's telling that I've not reached for any other concealer since I received it.  However, the performance does come at a high price - £25 - although given how little you need, I'm guessing it'll last for a long time.  If I need to in the near future before getting distracted by something else, I will probably repurchase.

If you'd like to try it yourself, you can get Secret Camouflage from SpaceNK at £25 for 7.7g.