Tried & Tested – BB Creams

BB Creams have been out for a few years now and with the arrival of the CC Cream and the DD Cream, they are still a firm favourite amongst many beauty lovers.

So what is a BB Cream?

In short BB stands for beauty balms or blemish balms. They were originally developed to protect skin and provide coverage over laser treatments. The cream however became a success in Asia and they loved it for the natural coverage it gave compared to foundation. Myself I always thought it was a bit of a glorified tinted moisturiser, however a real BB cream can provide many benefits to the skin, including hydration, cover imperfections, improve dullness and also provide coverage from UV rays with SPF.

I decided to test out a few that include SPF as I swear by BB and CC Cream in Summer. It is just so much lighter to wear on the face and really makes it look so smoothed out. Sometimes I find foundation can stick to the skin and look a bit gross after a hot summers day.

balance me’s BB Cream has SPF 25 which is great for the summer months. The colour was great as it is designed to adjust to any skin tone. It’s also 99% natural so the good it is doing on your face, you can imagine is just brilliant. The only one with this is I would have liked a little more coverage on any imperfections.

Vichy BB Cream is ideal if you want a high SPF like 50 to protect your face. For me I wasn’t so keen on the colour of the product and found it a bit orange, being the natural tan shade, although I think it only comes in one shade. It did however give good coverage and a lovely glow to it. A great one for holiday with the SPF but once I had tried the others I’d say this one was probably my least favourite of the three.

L to R balance me BB Natural Perfection with SPF 25, Vichy Ideal Soleil ‘Tinted Velvety Cream’ with SPF 50,  and KIKO Sunproof BB Cream with SPF 30.

KIKO’s BB Cream says it offers a foundation treatment and a natural effect. I found this one to have good coverage and great that it has a high SPF. The colour light, which is the lightest was quite a tanned colour, so if you are very pale it might be too dark. It stayed on well however and gave skin a lovely smooth look.

Out of these three my favourite was definitely the balance me for its colour and overall look. I was pretty surprised at the difference in colours between the three light shades. I still absolutely love my favourite Ginvera BB Cream however and not sure I’d ever be able to replace it.

Have you tried a BB Cream before?