Body

The Real Deal About Body BB Creams

BB. CC. DD. WTF are these body alphabet creams, and why are they flying off shelves?

by Katie McCarthy | 1 COMMENT

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Major, Full-Body Coverage Karora CC Cream for Face and Body, $35
Good for: correcting medium skin tones with heavy coverage for a special event

Our take: Karora's 3.38-ounce CC cream is formulated for your face and bod, but it seems way better suited to the former. The coverage is surprisingly thick and opaque — like a light foundation on your limbs. It's also marketed as being appropriate for all skin tones, which seems like a stretch; it looked streaky and brown on my super-light legs and the color transferred onto the edge of my black leather desk chair. Too deep for the pale-faced, too light for the dark-complexioned, this product is very clearly for women with a medium skin tone.

That said, my coworker Hayley, a prolific self-tanner whose skin tone matched the cream's shade, fell in love. Her gams looked oddly perfect after she smoothed this on, making any bruises or imperfections virtually disappear while giving that luminous, even-toned appearance. So if you bump into a lot of coffee tables or get a lot of shaving nicks, Karora's CC could very well be your holy grail product. Also, with its intense pigmentation, this can easily be diluted with body lotion to get sheerer coverage -- just don't wear a white dress.

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I'm not sure why I didn't take notice when Jergens' breakthrough BB Body Perfecting Skin Cream came out last year -- when women were paying three times the retail price on eBay/selling their first-born children to get the stuff. I guess I was too busy smearing diluted tinted moisturizer on my legs. (It's just for special occasions! Don't judge me!) Suffice it to say when word of this body BB cream came my way, I was intrigued. I've spent so many cumulative hours trying to elevate this mug of mine from "blotchy Northern European pale-face" to "Christina Hendricks alabaster" that taking a few seconds to apply a tone-enhancing, skin-perfecting product on my body seemed completely appropriate. On that note, I dug into the BB body creams that have recently hit the market -- plus the body CC and DD creams that are following in their wake. Do you really need a body alphabet cream? Here's what I found out.

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