Review! Benefit High Beam

Benefit's Highbeam is a liquid luminizer.  It has a pink tint in the bottle, but mostly sheers out to a glowy white shade.  I bought it to try it out as a "highlight" in my "highlight and contour" experiments.  I am neither dissappointed nor impressed.  It does indeed illuminate the skin, but for the price I was expecting something more.  It's basically a shimmer lotion with a satin-glow finish.  I'm not sure what "more" I was expecting, but this stuff is not cheap, and for the price I thought it would be more than a shimmer lotion.

You can get smaller sized bottles (plenty to try it out with) in some of the mini-sets that Benefit has, such as the "Go TropiCORAL Lip & Cheek Kit", the "Do The Bright Thing" kit, or the "Legally Bronze" kit.  The plus side of buying a kit is that you get trial sizes of many items for the same price as one full sized product would have cost.  I prefer to buy makeup this way for that reason, and because I tend to get bored with an item long before I could ever use the full-size version.

I am going to use the rest of this, but I'll stick to using it for smaller highlighting applications, such as the browbone and cupid's bow.  For general use, I'll add it to my foundation mix for days that I'd like some extra shimmer.

How about some pictures?

Before:

During:

As an aside, I do NOT recommend putting it all on first and then blending.  It dries pretty quickly, and you'll mess up your foundation if it dries and then you try to blend it.  I realized this part-way through and started blending as quickly as I could.  I didn't make it to my chin before it was pretty dry, and it caked and smeared the foundation there.

After:

The results are subtle.  In the photo, it just looks to me like makeup that has been worn for a while, like oil break-through.  In person, it is more shimmery/glowy.  Overall, it is not enough of a "wow" improvement to justify the cost.  I have heard that Boots makes an exact dupe, so if I continue to like adding it to my foundation mix, I'll purchase that one instead.


This look will be continued in the next post, when I try out a new bronzer for the contouring phase!