Summer is a fertile time for beauty lovers, who can enjoy the incessant turnstile of new product releases. In a flooded market, good products can quite easily be drowned out by the pomp or inflated marketing budgets of others. Here are five of my favourite releases of summer 2019 so far.
Murad Prebiotic 4-in-1 Multicleanser (€40 at murad.co.uk) is a cleanser that anyone can use, morning or night. An excellent all-rounder, it features a gel-to-oil consistency that works for people of all skin types and dissolves make-up efficiently. It is pleasingly gentle and features no synthetic fragrance or alcohol, so it is great for skin that tends to be reactive or fussy. A good cleanser is essential to create the correct canvas for leave-on skincare.
After toning, I have taken to applying Kate Somerville Soothe and Restore Ceramides + Omegas Serum (€96.60 at Space NK) morning and night. Kate Somerville products are far from cheap, but this intensely soothing omega- and ceramide-rich serum restores and supports a compromised skin lipid barrier (making it ideal for use after laser and other treatments), soothes burning and itching (if you go too hard on the retinol) and plumps incomparably.
A good mascara is always essential, but during summer, a waterproof version is advisable. Urban Decay Perversion Waterproof Mascara (€23.50 at Arnotts and Debenhams) is a reimagined waterproof iteration of Urban Decay's blackest, most robust and impressive mascara. The thick, generous brush is the right kind – an old-fashioned bristled model that grabs and coats every lash. You will need an oil or balm make-up remover to remove this, but that is the most effective form of cleansing, which we should all be using anyway.
If mascara is the eye essential, eyeshadow comes in at a close second. I could live without it, had I a mind to (I don't), but Lancôme Hypnose Eyeshadow Palette in Fraîcheur Rosée (€50 at Brown Thomas) would tempt even the most abstemious make-up minimalists. The new Hypnose Palette range offers a palette for any taste you might imagine (it even includes a beautiful gold and royal blue palette worthy of Cleopatra herself), but this rosy nude captured me right away. Nudes may seem boring, but they enhance the face you have rather than requiring the artistic construction of a new one, and you will use them until they every molecule has been winkled from the pan.
If you have read this column for any length of time, you will know that it is the practical products that I love most – a good cleanser, a nude eyeshadow palette. However, I reserve the right to claim as much internal inconsistency as the rest of us when I declare love from the rooftops for Tom Ford Private Blend Lavender Extrême Eau de Parfum (€245 at Brown Thomas). It is an agonisingly expensive, agonisingly beautiful fragrance that subverts all expectation and is, frankly, gloriously excessive. Lavender, tonka and woody benzoin collide to create an ungendered fragrance of such astonishing charisma that it is utterly knee-weakening and completely unique.
