REVIEW: Aero Minerale Foundation

During a recent Haute Look promotion I picked up an Aero Minerale foundation that I thought looked pretty interesting.  I will admit to having been sucked in by the marketing that this was the foundation they used during the Twilight Breaking Down movie on the female characters.

Who doesn't want that perfect luminous (undead?) complexion?

Anyhow, I got it in the mail today and was quite excited to try it out.  I had been rather intrigued by the concept of airbrushed makeup, and regularly try to duplicate the effect with a Beauty Blender or my trusty Sigma F80 brush with liquid foundations.  The Tempu airbrush foundation is way out of my price range and the Aero Minerale at $12 was just a hair more than what I'd spend on a drugstore foundation so I figured, what the heck right?

Picking a foundation color sight unseen was a gamble but luckily the one I selected BUFF worked out ok on my skin.

A couple of initial thoughts on this stuff - it dries FAST, so you only have about 30-45 seconds to get it on your face and blended in before it starts to set.  The spray radius is WIDE, so it is pretty hard to control where this stuff is going, especially since you will probably have your eyes closed when you spray it onto your face (unless going blind is your thing - eyepatches can be sexy I guess).   Cover your hair and do your foundation before any other makeup cause the blast radius is kind of crazy.  Applying it this way also can make the foundation stick to the tiny hairs on your face, so make sure you check for that and blend it into your skin with your fingers in a light tapping motion.

After a few tries, I decided that spraying it directly onto my face wasn't the best method of application.  This of course completely missed the point of it being an airbrushed system since I'd be applying it like any other foundation that I already own.  (Lame.)  I'll be the first to admit that this might be because I wasn't used to the aerosol application method, but it seemed a pretty wasteful learning curve and more trouble than it was worth.

I ended up spraying some onto the back of my hand and applying it with a Sigma F80 flat top kabuki brush, stippling it onto my skin, working as quickly as I could before the stuff dried.  The coverage was very buildable without looking cakey, but it oxidized a bit on my skin and took on a bit of an orange cast.

The Twilight vamps can keep this foundation to themselves, cause it didn't float my boat and I could not wait to wipe the stuff off.