If you’re questing for a sorta-foundation that offers some skin-perfecting goodness without a whole lot of coverage, this Liquid Blurring Skin Tint is for you! It lightly blurs imperfections and gently evens out skin tone, pairing beautifully with a bit of concealer for any areas that need a bit more coverage or colour correction. It applies easily with fingers or a damp sponge, leaving the skin looking like its best self. It’s also really easy to make, and you can easily customize it!

How to Make Liquid Blurring Skin Tint

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I made this all the way back in 2018 and honestly, I kind of forgot about it. I created several different versions before heading off to the United Kingdom for the 2018 Formula Botanica conference and was testing it around that time, but I think it got lost in the shuffle of travel and all the other things I was working on at the time. I recently found the bottles of the various versions and started using them again, and decided the best of them was well worth sharing!

 

The bulk of this Liquid Blurring Skin Tint is argan oil, but you could easily use any mid-weight-ish liquid oil that your skin loves. I also tried it with passionfruit oil, and I bet prickly pear seed oil, jojoba oil, meadowfoam oil, and/or pomegranate oil would all be lovely alternatives. You could also try blending something heavier, like evening primrose oil, with something lighter, like Neossance® Hemisqualane. There’s plenty of room for you to have fun and infuse this foundation with some oil serum style goodness!

The colour and coverage of this Liquid Blurring Skin Tint comes from your own custom-made mineral makeup. I go into a lot of detail on how to make it (including a full spread of colour blending tips + six starter colour blends) in my book, Make it Up: The Essential Guide to DIY Makeup and Skin Care! Kate shared this review for Make it Up and the foundation formulation in it: “This book is worth buying for the foundation recipe alone! She’s got this chapter on foundation where you first blend a big batch of you colored powder and then you turn that into foundation (liquid or powder), concealer, and lightweight airbrushing powder. Then you can make highlighter, bronzer, and blush to match. It was so much fun and so easy. It also looks and wears better than anything I’ve ever bought in the store. Ever. I used to buy the high end $80 foundation. This is better.”

For some added skin-blurring awesomeness I’ve included a soft paste/putty, made up of a blend of silicones, silicas, and some beeswax. Lotion Crafter sells it as OptiBlur™ Elastomer; it appears to be a Dow product named “DOWSIL™ 9576 Smooth Away Elastomer“. This lovely ingredient adds optical blurring to the skin tint, helping to disguise the appearance of fine lines and pores, and also adds a really lovely silky-smooth feel to the end product (along with some silica microspheres).

As this product is mostly a thin liquid with some added powder, the powder will settle out over time. To counter that, I’ve included some of TKB Trading’s “Thickening Clay”Quaternium-90 Sepiolite (and) Quaternium-90 Montmorillonite. This fine powder helps pigments stay suspended in liquid bases, though I don’t find it stops settling out completely. It also contributes to a drier feeling end product, which is lovely in small doses, though can tip into straight-up drying if too much is used.

The finished Liquid Blurring Skin Tint is silky smooth, with an expensive-feeling dry-touch finish. It offers optical skin-perfecting along with some mild colour correction and complexion-evening, and it’s easy to apply with fingers or a damp sponge. If you want to increase the amount of coverage you can always use more mineral makeup, reducing the argan oil to make room for it. I hope you like it as much as I do!

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Liquid Blurring Skin Tint

1.365g | 19.5% fractionated coconut oil
0.49g | 7% OptiBlur™ Elastomer

0.77g | 11% mineral makeup (from the blog or the book)

3.99g | 57% argan oil (USA / Canada)
0.035g | 0.5% Vitamin E MT-50 (USA / Canada)

0.245g | 3.5% silica microspheres (USA / Canada)
0.105g | 1.5% TKB’s thickening clay

Weigh the fractionated coconut oil and optiblur into a small container—I recommend a small disposable mixing cup, like the sort used to measure out liquid medicines. Use a small wire whisk or a small hand-held battery powered mixer to first mash the mixture together to break the optiblur into smaller pieces, and then blend to thoroughly combine.

Add the mineral makeup, stir, and then blend. Add the argan oil and vitamin E.

Put on your dust mask. Weigh the silica microspheres and thickening clay into the mixture, stir, and then blend. Once the mixture is uniform, you’re done!

For packaging, I used a 10mL plastic squeeze bottle with a dropper top, and that worked perfectly. I recommend something that will allow you to dispense just a drop or two of product at a time.

To use, shake the bottle and dispense a few drops onto fingertips. Glide the skin tint over the skin, blending it in with fingers or a damp sponge (I find this foundation doesn’t work as well with brushes). Enjoy!

Shelf Life & Storage

Because this foundation is 100% oil based, it does not require a broad-spectrum preservative (broad spectrum preservatives ward off microbial growth, and microbes require water to live—no water, no microbes!). Kept reasonably cool and dry, it should last at least a year before any of the oils go rancid. If you notice it starts to smell like old nuts or crayons, that’s a sign that the oils have begun to oxidize; chuck it out and make a fresh batch if that happens.

Substitutions

As always, be aware that making substitutions will change the final product. While these swaps won’t break the recipe, you will get a different final product than I did.

  • As I’ve provided this recipe in percentages as well as grams you can easily calculate it to any size using a simple spreadsheet as I’ve explained in this post. As written in grams this recipe will make 7g, which fills a 10mL bottle nicely.
  • To learn more about the ingredients used in this recipe, including why they’re included and what you can substitute them with, please visit the Humblebee & Me Encyclopedia. It doesn’t have everything in it yet, but there’s lots of good information there! If I have not given a specific substitution suggestion in this list please look up the ingredient in the encyclopedia before asking.
  • You could use a different lightweight carrier oil or ester in place of fractionated coconut oil. Medium chain triglycerides, squalane, C12-15 alkyl benzoate, and Neossance® Hemisqualane would all work well.
  • I have no good suggestions for replacing the OptiBlur Elastomer with a different single product. For this formulation, I’d probably start with a blend of something else that offers blurring (sericite mica, silica microspheres) and more liquid oil or dimethicone. Keep in mind that silica microspheres can be drying on the skin in high concentrations.
  • You could probably try a store-bought mineral makeup if that’s all you have, though that will make this recipe significantly more expensive.
  • You can use a different midweight liquid oil that your skin loves instead of argan oil; read the pre-amble for details.
  • You could try sericite mica or silica dimethyl silylate instead of silica microspheres.
  • If you don’t have thickening clay I’d recommend using 50/50 kaolin clay and silica microspheres. With this substitution, you will find the pigment settles out of the product quite quickly and needs to be shaken before use, but this swap will help replace the dry feel from the thickening clay.