You beauty! Annabel Rivkin's cabinet of wonders

 
Pure Color Blush in Blushing Nude
Tobi Jenkins
Annabel Rivkin4 May 2012

Do you remember ‘rouge’? My grandmother used rouge. She applied it with a cotton wool ball. Remember those? Now when I go to a hotel and they have cotton wool balls rather than pads I become incandescent. How can one cleanse with a ball? You can swab with a ball. Just swab.

Rouge became ‘blusher’, then mutated into ‘blush’, which, to my mind, remains an Americanism. Sniff. I have long swerved the powder. It felt old-fashioned. I preferred the smearing of cream (the Americans say ‘crème’ even though they’re not French) blusher over the ‘apples’ because I thought that gave me more natural radiance. I thought it was more malleable, subtler, more modern.

But I have rediscovered powder blusher – I’m sticking to my British guns on the terminology, just as I will never ‘reach out’ to you. Don’t take it personal. New technology has rendered the powdery stuff radiance enhancing, light reflecting, long lasting and bloomingly flattering. It is particularly good as the weather warms up as powder helps to prevent ‘glow’ that can read as ‘shine’.

Estée Lauder’s new Pure Color Blush has a satin finish and an inbuilt antioxidant complex. I’ve taken to carting it everywhere with me in Blushing Nude. It is finely ground, delivering a poppingly buildable pigment that can be harnessed to sculpt and coax cheeks (Liz Earle is about to launch some excellent new brushes) towards a brilliant, delicious roundness that makes you look, somehow, cheerful. Even when you’re murderous. Odd that. But useful. You can take the bastards by surprise. They’ll never see it coming. Not from one so radiant.

Pure Color Blush in Blushing Nude, £24 (esteelauder.co.uk)

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