Elf Studio Corrective Concealer

Evening everyone.  I have quite a few blemishes on my face, so I get through a lot of concealers - I'm yet to find my HG concealer, although I've found some pretty good ones.  Last summer I spotted the ELF Studio Corrective Concealer on the ELF website for a bargainous £3.50, so I snapped it up.  What could go wrong?

Well, much as I love some of the products that ELF produce, this is very definitely a miss from me.  Don't get me wrong, it looks nice, is the expensive looking Studio black packaging, and it has a decent sized mirror inside the case as well as coming with an actually quite decent little (Studio quality) brush for applying the concealer.  However, appearances can be deceiving, and this one definitely had me fooled.

The website states that there are four colours:  green for neutralising redness, lilac for concealing yellow tones and a nude and beige shade for covering blemishes.  Well here's the first problem - I cannot tell the difference between the supposed nude and beige shade - I honestly don't know which is which, other than they're both an orangey shade and wrong for me.  With other concealer palettes I own, I like to mix up the different shades before applying to my blemishes.  However, ELF have handily designed this palette with the two blemish shades at opposite ends of the palette, so if you don't look down at what you're doing, you can easily dip you finger or brush into the lilac or green by accident and end up with a very weird colour combination.

Other issues I have with this palette are that it is underfilled in the pan, and not easy to get the product out with your fingers (which is usually how I apply concealer), and the terrible quality of the concealer itself.  I like a concealer to be a relatively firm consistency, although creamy, so you can apply it, blend it out and then it sets.  I've used other sub-five pound concealer palettes which have achieved this, but the ELF one is a big fail.  The consistency of the concealer is really soft, watery and slippy.  It is so insipid that it slips onto your face and you can't actually see where you've applied it, so weak is the pigmentation.  Actually, the lack of pigmentation is probably a good thing, judging by those frightening orange shades. The concealer is not buildable and it doesn't set.  So, if you cover a blemish and you can still see it, which given the terrible pigmentation is highly likely, you won't be able to apply any more concealer on top of it as it's so watery you'll just wipe off your first layer of concealer.  By the way, the green and lilac are just as poor quality as the beige and nude colours.

Here are some swatches, swatched in the order the colours are in the pan.  I took loads of photos and these are the best ones.  These were swatched onto my arm, after really rubbing my finger into the colours - no actually gouging out the colours, and my arm was dry with no moisturiser on it - imagine the lack of pigmentation dabbing these on to a moisturised face!

Well can I think of anything good to say about this, other than nice packaging and nice brush?  Well, I suppose it's so watery and soft that it won't dry out your skin like more cake-type concealers can do.  However, given that it doesn't actually do what it is supposed to do, that is to conceal blemishes and colour correct, then I don't think this is a unique selling point myself.

Incidentally, this is not the worst concealer that I've ever used.  Powderflage by Benefit is clearly the worst concealer ever marketed - I'll have to do a review of it sometime, as it is simply useless and conceals even less than the ELF palette.  However, you can use Powderflage as a highlighter instead of a concealer, so you can put it to another purpose...

The ELF Studio Corrective Concealer is one of my Project 15 Pan items, and is probably the item that I'm struggling with the most to use up as I just hate it.  I usually get through concealers really quickly!  I am trying my hardest though, so hopefully I can throw it out soon!

Have you tried this?  Did you have a better experience than I did?

Thanks for reading!  xx