The Easy Hack That Makes Even The Most Orange-Toned Bronzer Work On Your Skin
We all love it when our bronzer turns us into glowy, golden angels. Bronzer is an essential product for any beauty-lover, but it can also be the weak link in your makeup collection. Tragically, it's all too-easy to pick the wrong shade of bronzer and go from sun-kissed to sunburnt. The ideal bronzer shade should take your natural skin tone and elevate it with a warm, subtle shine, but if you go too warm or too dark, you'll end up with an orange face.
Trying out a new bronzer and realizing you chose the wrong shade is frustrating to say the least, but it doesn't mean the product has to go to waste. If you like the texture and glow of a bronzer, but the color is leaning too orange, you can still put it to use with some simple color correction. For this easy hack, all you'll need is bronzer, red cream blush, and a makeup brush.
How to fix orange bronzer
This simple hack for color-correcting orange bronzer comes from TikTok creator Rose Siard. In the video, Siard, who's a makeup artist, shares the best way to tone down an orange bronzer. She starts by applying bronzer the way she normally would to the cheekbones, temple, and hairline. After pointing out how orange the bronzer looks against her skin, she pulls out a red cream blush. She picks up a bit of red blush onto her makeup brush and applies it on top of the bronzer, blending the red into the bronzer until the orange tones are eliminated. Once the bronzer color has been corrected, Siard follows up with her regular blush shade, placing it slightly above her bronzer, as she normally does in her makeup routine.
You can achieve this color-correcting hack with a cream or powder blush, as long as it's a true red shade, not pink or orange. If you have multiple red blushes from which to choose, go with whichever blush has the most iridescent or glowy finish, since you don't want to use a matte blush that cancels out the glow of your bronzer. Begin with a minimal amount of blush and gradually build it up until you get your bronzer to a color you like. Remember, you can always add more red, but if you put on too much you'll likely have to remove your makeup and start over.
The color theory behind the hack
Now, this makeup tip may sound contradictory to the standard color-correcting advice that you usually hear. Most of the time, your best option for color correction is to neutralize the unwanted color by using a product that's on the opposite side of the color wheel from the undesirable tone. For example, you correct dark under-eye circles with orange to cancel out the blue. With that logic, you might assume that you need blue to correct an orange bronzer. However, in the case of color correcting a bronzer, you aren't trying to conceal the bronzer entirely, but rather modify the tone. This is why using red, orange's neighbor on the color wheel, works so well.
Orange is a mix of red and yellow, so if a bronzer is looking too orange, you can pull it back into the red-orange family by adding more red (via Color Meanings). The red will flatter the cooler tones in your skin and make the bronzer look more natural, as if you really had spent time out in the sun.