I’ve been curious about mineral make-up for quite some time. The commercials are impressive. The women look great. Their skin looks positively dewey, a look I achieve only briefly on my way from dry and flaky to highly reflective. But my curiosity and yen for youthful dewiness does not outweigh my need for frugality, so a drugstore brand was destined to be my first choice.

Thus I recently bought a jar of Rimmel Lasting Finish Mineral Powder Foundation for a Jackson (i.e. $5) and skipped home with it. I was going to be dewey! Then cold reality set in.

First off, the jar and applicator proved to be quite puzzling. I felt like a monkey given a retractable pen, or a stud finder. I turned it up and down, around and around, before I figured out how to remove the cap. That being accomplished, I took a break and had a reviving beverage before moving onto application.

The applicator itself is a foam pad similar to those found in Absorbine Junior bottles – a product that I remember fondly from my youth. (Was there ever an Absorbine Senior? I wonder.) Upon studying the pad, I found that it was a bit larger in circumference than that portion of the jar that held the foundation. That didn’t stop me from trying, repeatedly, to shove the pad into the jar to get at the powder (more monkey behavior). Then I noticed the holes in the underside of the cap that houses the pad, similar to the holes in a spice jar. The idea is that, with the two sections of the bottle screwed together, you shake it vigorously, thereby shaking the power through the holes of the cap and onto the back of the applicator, where by some miracle of science it will penetrate through the entire body of the sponge and out the other side, where it will then meet your skin.

But guess what? It doesn’t work. The pad is just not porous enough for the powder to penetrate all the way through the back of it and onto your (now impatient) face. So I shook the powder onto the top of a jar of hair gel, dipped the foam thing in, and applied.

Results: meh.

It didn’t seem any different to me than the effect you get with a regular compact of face powder and a puff or brush. In fact, it probably is ground up compact stuff. In this case, I may have received what I paid for.

Pros: inexpensive, provides similar coverage to a regular compact
Cons: it’s not really Absorbine Junior, and now I have a pain in my ass that could actually use some