Silicone primer, water-based primer, and the reason things pill

This page contains affiliate links. MoreThanMy earns a commission on qualifying purchases, at no extra cost to you.

Researched. We have not used this one long enough to give you a verdict, and we would rather say so than invent one. What follows is how it works, who it suits, and what it will not do. When we have used it properly, this page carries the verdict and the date.

Smashbox Photo Finish Foundation Primer

Pilling is the small grey-white rolls that appear under a brush or a fingertip, usually across the cheek, usually about five minutes after you were pleased with yourself.

They are not your skin. They are the products you have just applied, rolled back up.

What a pill actually is

Nearly everything you put on your face is a film waiting to happen. A serum, a moisturizer, a sunscreen, a primer — each is some combination of film-forming polymer, thickening gum, and a solvent that carries the two of them onto skin. The solvent leaves. The film stays. The film is the part doing the job.

Pilling is that film failing in one of two ways.

It had not finished setting. A film still holding solvent is soft and mobile. Drag anything across it and it gathers, and once it has gathered it rolls.

It never bonded to the layer beneath. If the second product will not spread across the first, it beads instead. The beads then get dragged around and rolled into the same little cylinders.

Everything below is a variation on those two.

The silicone and water split

Silicone primers are built on dimethicone, cyclopentasiloxane, dimethicone crosspolymer, trisiloxane — as a rule of thumb, anything ending in -methicone or -siloxane. They spread thin, they feel slippery, and they leave a very low-energy surface behind them.

Low surface energy is the whole story. Water does not want to spread across a silicone film. It beads on it, the way rain beads on a waxed car. A water-based foundation applied over a silicone primer is doing precisely that at a scale you cannot see, and then your sponge arrives.

Water-based primers put water or aqua first on the list, followed by glycerin, a gum such as xanthan or carbomer, and a water-soluble film former such as a polyacrylate or PVP. They feel like a gel. They dry to a slightly tacky film, which is what "grip" means on the front of the packaging.

The rule of thumb — silicone over silicone, water over water — is not a law of chemistry. But it is a sound default, and it explains most cases where two products a person likes perfectly well on their own refuse to live together.

How to read a label in ten seconds

Look at the first five or six ingredients and nothing else. Everything past that is present in small enough quantity that it is not the thing deciding the texture.

If those first few are siloxanes and methicones, it is a silicone product. If it is water, glycerin and a gum, it is a water-based one. If it is water first and dimethicone third, it is an emulsion of both — which is extremely common, and which behaves cleanly like neither. Emulsions are where the rule of thumb stops being reliable and swatching two products together on the back of your hand starts earning its keep.

The cause that is more common than either

Too much, too fast.

A fairly ordinary morning: essence, serum, eye cream, moisturizer, sunscreen, primer, foundation. Seven films in five minutes. Modern sunscreens are particularly dense with film formers, because that is how a sunscreen stays put and stays even, and they are the layer most often covered over before they are ready.

Any one of those still wet underneath the next will roll. The fixes are dull and they work.

• Fewer products. Most routines have at least one layer doing a job another layer is already doing.
• Thinner layers. Twice as much product does not do twice as much. It just takes twice as long to set.
• Wait. Long enough that the previous layer has stopped feeling wet — usually a minute or two, and longer after sunscreen.
• Press, do not sweep. A dense brush dragged across a soft film is a machine for making pills. Stippling, or pressing with a damp sponge, applies product without shearing what is underneath.

What a primer actually is

A surface.

That is the honest description of it. It fills micro-texture so that foundation sits evenly instead of sinking into the low points and pooling there. Some are tacky, so foundation slips less. Some are blurring, using silica or silicone elastomer spheres to level the rim of a pore so it stops casting a small shadow — which is what makes a pore visible in the first place.

"Reduces the look of" is the accurate description of that, and it is also, not coincidentally, the phrasing regulation permits. A primer is a cosmetic. It sits on the surface, it comes off with your cleanser, and it has changed nothing about the pore itself. That is not a criticism. Sitting on the surface and looking better is the entire job.

What it will not do

• It will not keep foundation on an oily face. Oil arrives from underneath, and a film sitting on top does not know anything about that.
• It will not rescue a foundation you do not like. The wrong finish over a smoother surface is still the wrong finish.
• It will not hydrate anything in a way that outlasts the evening.
• It will not be your sunscreen. A primer carrying an SPF number is regulated as a sunscreen, but it gets applied in a primer-sized amount, and that is not the amount the number was measured at.

When the primer is not the problem

If the thing you want blurred is congestion — the small bumpy texture across the nose and chin, rather than pores you were born with — then you are buying a primer to cover something that has its own answer, and what a BHA actually does is the more useful page.

Blurring is a fair thing to buy. It is just an expensive way to manage something on a permanent basis.

The one thing that decides whether this works

Ninety seconds.

Not a different primer. Not a better sponge. The single change that fixes most pilling is leaving each layer alone long enough to finish becoming a film, and it is unpopular advice precisely because it costs nothing and cannot be bought.

The product

It is the archetypal silicone primer, it has been on shelves since the early 2000s, and dimethicone sits at the top of the ingredient list where anyone can see it. If you want to find out how the silicone side of the split behaves on your face, this is the least mysterious way to do it.

The one people are searching for is the Smashbox Photo Finish Foundation Primer.

Smashbox Photo Finish Foundation Primer

We do not print prices here, because a price we typed last month is a price that is wrong today.

Written by JamieG in Garner Town, Tennessee.