As a general rule of thumb, cool-toned bronzers and blushes are going to look best on your freckled skin, because you want to avoid anything that is too similar in color to your freckles. Babaian says to use a light hand when applying a bronzer, and recommends only dusting it around the perimeter of your face (otherwise it can make your freckles blend together). Hughes recommends a "cool, mid-tone" bronzer like Nars Laguna or Butter London Bit Faker (if you prefer a cream formula).
To really make your cheeks pop, pick up a cool pink blush -- Babaian likes the way it brightens the face when contrasted with brown freckles.
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Your Freckles Show Through Your Lipstick
For everyone else, lipstick is a quick and easy way to look pulled together. But when you've got freckles around your mouth and even on your lips, even applying a bold lipstick can become a major time suck. To pull off your favorite bright MAC lipstick, Babaian likes to cover the entire lip with a lip liner in the same shade as the lipstick first, and then apply the lipstick on top. If that makes it too bold, you can swap out the bright lip liner for a neutral one to cover up any freckles on your lips. These same rules apply for lighter lipsticks as well.
If you've got freckles around your lips that compete for attention when you're wearing lip color, Babaian suggests using a peachy concealer around your lip line to cancel them out.
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You're Using The Wrong Color to Cover Your Pimples
The sheer foundation Babaian recommends probably isn't going to do much in the way of covering up acne. She says to dot on a yellow concealer to knock out any redness -- but make sure to apply after you've put on your foundation, since applying foundation over concealer can smear it around and undo all of your hard work. You can also use a color-correcting primer (Hughes recommends the Smashbox Color Correcting Primers, or you can try one of our faves, Clinique Superprimer Face Primer) underneath your foundation to help cancel out any blotchiness.
To conceal acne, Hughes says to grab the smallest concealer brush you have and lightly dab on a full-coverage concealer only where you need it. Dust it with a translucent powder to set everything in place.
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You Smother Your Freckles in Foundation
"I love freckled faces, but sometimes you just don't want to look cute, which freckles have a tendency to convey," says Babaian. When you want to hide your freckles, don't head straight to the heavy-duty foundations and concealers. "You have to do it with color, not thickness," she advises. Meaning: Find a sheer foundation that has slightly pink or peach undertones (even if your skin has yellow undertones), which will camouflage freckles. Build up the coverage as you go, concentrating on areas where your freckles are darkest and using less foundation in areas where your freckles are lighter. Use a fluffy brush to apply a translucent setting powder, like Make Up For Ever HD Microfinish Powder, to make your makeup last. Powder is what makes foundation finishes cake-y, warns Babaian, so make sure you dust on a very sheer layer.
In the end, remember that it all comes down to application. Hughes says that you can use a full-coverage foundation,but to keep it from looking heavy, dab a damp Beauty Blender over your skin after applying it. This will thin the makeup enough just enough to give you a flawless but natural finish.
For anyone, finding the perfect foundation shade is about as easy as following a rainbow to its end. Add freckles to the mix and, well, you might as well be looking for a leprechaun and pot of gold, too. You're faced with issues like whether you should match your foundation to your freckles, to the rest of your face or to some shade halfway between the two.Then, there's the question of coverage: Should you completely cover them? If you don't want to conceal them, will your freckles look strangely muted? The list of questions goes on and on, making it easy to give up on makeup altogether. So we turned to Katie Jane Hughes, makeup artist and Global Colour Ambassador for Butter London, and Los Angeles-based celebrity makeup artist Taylor Babaian to answer all our questions about applying makeup to freckled skin.
