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11 best foundations for pale skin: From full coverage to lightweight formulas
Shopping for fair skin tones no longer needs to be a struggle with these tried-and-tested products
Pippa Bailey
Friday 19 June 2020 12:15 BST
Our Top Picks
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It doesn’t much matter if you find your holy grail foundation if you can’t get it in a shade that matches your skin.
Thankfully, with brands under pressure to increase their shade offering across the range, paler-than-pale is no longer such a niche requirement.
We’ve been testing foundations to find those that not only sit well on skin and last well, but also offer shades that match pale skin beautifully, whether you’ve got oily or dry skin, yellow or peach undertones.
Consider whether you’d prefer a yellow tone to even out the pink in your skin – or vice versa – rather than matching your natural tone.
It can be tricky to buy a foundation in person during a pandemic, but if you can get to a store, don’t swatch foundations on your hand: apply along the cheek under the cheekbone and along the jawline, where you’re less likely to have redness and you can see how well the shade blends to your neck.
You can trust our independent reviews. We may earn commission from some of the retailers, but we never allow this to influence selections, which are formed from real-world testing and expert advice. This revenue helps to fund journalism across The Independent.
1Estee Lauder double wear stay-in-place make-up
The brand’s long-standing favourite “double wear” now comes in a phenomenal 61 shades, with plenty of cool and warm tones. It offers medium, buildable coverage, is comfortable to wear and stays put all day, even through high humidity. Those with dry skin may find it leaves cheeks papery after a few hours wear, so you need to start with a well-moisturised base.
2Shiseido skin self-refreshing foundation
Japanese beauty brands aren’t classically known for their wide shade range, but this is pleasingly broad and well-balanced. Be warned, we did find that the shades come up lighter in real-life than they appear on the website. The finish is silky with a subtle glow, and it’s highly pigmented so you don’t need to wear a huge amount of product to get good coverage.
3Too Faced born this way foundation
We found this had a light, second-skin feel with a subtle, natural-looking glow and fairly full coverage. The shade range has been expanded since its initial launch (when even the palest shade was too dark for many pale skins) and it now comes in 35 shades, including the gorgeously named “cloud”, “snow” and “pearl”. The Too Faced website has pictures of models with half made-up faces, allowing you to compare bare skin and the foundation, which we found useful for choosing a shade.
4Illamasqua skin base foundation
This foundation comes in a pretty good shade range but the real star is 01, which is an opaque, milky white. We’ve yet to find anyone who can actually wear it as a foundation, but it is ideal for mixing with other products you may have that aren’t quite the right shade to match exactly to your skin tone. Particularly useful if you’ve bought foundation online during lockdown.
5Huda Beauty fauxfilter foundation
This formula has a thin consistency but offers medium coverage with a blurring, satin finish that lasts all day. It comes in 30 shades, with 12 falling into the light/fair categories. Drier skin types might find this too matte, so we’d recommend it for oily or combination skins. To help you decode the shade names, B (beige) has blue tones, R (red) pink, G (golden) has yellow tones and N stands for neutral.
6Bobbi Brown skin long-wear weightless foundation
The shade range of this foundation has been extended to feature more than 40 shades, and with its natural, matte-but-not-flat finish, we’ve yet to find a skin type it doesn’t suit. It gives medium, buildable coverage and has an almost gel-like, emollient feeling on application.
The verdict: Foundations for pale skin
Estee Lauder’s “double wear” is a bestseller for a reason: endlessly reliable, it’s also the most extensive range we’ve seen by far.