Real Techniques Your Base/Flawless Core Collection Review

Makeup brushes are so important to your makeup routine and trust me, they make applying almost everything easy. Quality is important but can be expensive. 

Makeup artist and YouTube vlogger Samantha Chapman of Pixiwoo (with her MUA sister Nicola) has her own line of makeup brushes out called Real Techniques and they're both high quality and inexpensive. I picked up the Your Base/Flawless Core Collection recently. It's my second Real Techniques brush kit (you can see my review of the Your Eyes/Enhanced Starter Set brush kit here). A store called Designer Cosmetics Warehouse in the underground shopping area beneath Holt Renfrew Centre on Bloor Street in Toronto carries the Real Techniques brushes.

The Your Base/Flawless Core Collection set cost me $29.95 and comes with four brushes, designed for creating a perfect base (foundation, concealer, powder, blush, contour, highlight, etc). 

Real Techniques brush sets come in a case that can be used for storage and turned into a stand for display or easy access. Sam being a makeup artist herself knows exactly what works well for makeup application and I think this idea is genius. 

Case open

Case as a stand

Case closed

The brushes in the Your Base/Flawless Core Collection are a buffing brush, detailer brush, pointed foundation brush and contour brush. The Real Techniques brushes are made of Taklon, a synthetic fiber used in high quality art and make-up brushes, so they're cruelty-free. The handles are aluminum, so they're light and they're colour coded so you know that all the purple ones are the enhanced eyes brushes, all the gold ones are meant for achieving a flawless face and the pink one are for a perfect finish. Let's look at each one more closely. 


The Buffing Brush is the largest of the four and meant for full coverage application of powder and mineral makeup. It's gorgeously soft and easy to manipulate over the skin, resulting in as full or as soft a coverage as you're looking for. You could use this with blush, highligher and bronzer as well.

The Detailer Brush is for applying concealer with its tapered, fine tip and can also be used for lipstick. I find this is far easier to use than a lip brush for applying concealer to blemishes or small areas of skin since you can use just the tip or the broader area and it's excellent for blending. I've also used this to apply eyeshadow to my inner eye and to my brow bone and I've used it to smudge eyeliner.

The Pointed Foundation Brush is for use with liquid foundation to build coverage. I like to use this with my cream concealers, as it's so effective in building coverage. It works well with liquid products too - eyeshadow, highlighter, etc. The tapered, broad tip works for painting on product and for buffing and blending. 

The Contour Brush is for delicately applying highlighter to contour areas and also for super-soft focus buffing. I've used this for contouring under my cheekbones and along the jawline and sides of the face. It's so perfect for creating the contour line and then buffing it out to the perfect shadow. It's lovely for adding a touch of highlighter as well, and makes it so easy to control just how much you want. 

At the bottom of the page here you can see a video of Sam using the Core Collection brushes. 

I love these brushes so much. They're super-soft and so easy to use. They're well-priced (about $8 per brush) and good quality. They pick up product beautifully and buff gorgeously. 

If you're in the market for some new brushes, I can't recommend the Real Techniques line enough. Learn more about them here and check out Sam and Nicola's YouTube channel here. 

Grade: A

C. 

LUSH Colour Supplements

Oh LUSH. You wacky, wonderful, inconsistent oddball of a company, you. I used to work for LUSH, years ago and it didn't end well so I found that my love of their products faded pretty rapidly as well. I do buy their bath bombs for a friend's kids at Christmas every year though.

In the UK, LUSH had opened a sister store called B Never Too Busy To Be Beautiful which carried make-up and fragrances but it closed in 2009. Luckily, LUSH appears to be incorporating some of the products that BNTBTBB carried into its regular stores and mailorder business. 

When I discovered that local LUSH stores were carrying a new foundationy cream colour I headed straight out to snap one up. They're called Colour Supplements and here's what www.lush.ca has to say about them: 

Perfect for giving an even, flawless look to your skin; these little beauties will cover up the odd blemish and tone down any redness. They can be used by themselves as a normal foundation for more concentrated coverage, or they can be mixed with our beautiful moisturizers to give a lighter, more dewy complexion. Made with red rose petal infusion to calm redness and glycerine to help your skin retain moisture, these mineral oil-free Colour Supplements do lovely things for your skin.

They also contain soya oil, rice brain and titanium oxide. LUSH explains the ingredients for all of its products on its website.

They are $13.95 CDN and come in 20g glass containers (the size of some lip balms) and four colours - light pink, dark pink, light yellow and dark yellow. These colours cover most skintones but won't work on darker skin which is disappointing. Obviously, if one of these shades won't work for your skintone, you can buy two and blend them.

The shades work as follows:

Light pink = pale or pink complexions

Light yellow = porcelain complexions

Dark pink = dark pink complexions

Dark yellow = dark olive complexions

I chose the light yellow shade. 

The texture is smooth and creamy.

Smeared on the back of my hand.

Blended a bit into the back of my hand.

Almost fully blended out.

The scent is very, very mild which is a surprise considering it's from LUSH. The scent I get most from it was rose which isn't unpleasant at all.


In the following photos I am wearing it all over my face. Beneath it I am wearing Kiehl's Ultra Tinted Moisturizer in Fair and on top of it I used Bare Escentuals Mineral Veil.

In natural light.

With flash.

The foundation wore quite well all day, although it was an abnormally non-humid  day. Normally, my skin gets oily quite quickly and my make-up begins to melt, but today, the Colour Supplement worked well. 


My skin did not feel dry or overly slick. I'm not used to using a cream or a liquid foundation so this took a little time to apply and I used my fingers to do so. It'd undoubtedly work better with a foundation brush. To minimize contamination, using a foundation brush rather than your fingers to dip into the container would be ideal.


LUSH suggests the Colour Supplements could be used as concealer as well as foundation, but I find the consistency of the product is pretty thin. I use MAC's Studio Finish concealer on a daily basis so the Colour Supplement just didn't cut it for me. It could cover some slight under-eye discolouration and redness though.


LUSH Colour Supplements can be blended with your moisturizer for a more dewy, sheer coverage. This product would be good for anyone looking for an easy, sheer, good-for-your-skin cream foundation. If you're a fan of LUSH, obviously this is a no-brainer, you're going to try it!


Have you tried the LUSH Colour Supplements? What do you think?


C.