Setting spray and setting powder solve different problems

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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.

Urban Decay All Nighter Long-Lasting Makeup Setting Spray

Setting spray and setting powder are shelved as alternatives and argued about as alternatives, and they are not alternatives. They address different failures.

Which means the question is not which one is better. It is which way your makeup is going wrong.

What a powder does

It absorbs.

Setting powders are built from porous particles with an enormous amount of surface area for their size — silica, starches, nylon-12 — usually alongside platy minerals like talc and mica, which are there to scatter light and give slip rather than to absorb. Sebum arrives at the surface and the particles take it up. At the same time they scatter light rather than reflecting it cleanly, so a surface that was glossy reads matte.

And they set, in the literal sense of the word. A liquid or cream layer stays mobile for as long as its solvent is present. Powder takes the wet phase out of the equation and the layer stops moving. That is why powder, and not spray, is what stops concealer travelling into a crease.

The limit is capacity. A given amount of powder absorbs a given amount of oil and then it is finished. Saturated powder is no longer a dry absorbent layer — it is a slightly darker, slightly greasy one sitting on top of your foundation. That is the two o'clock look, and putting more powder over it is answering a failure with more of the thing that just failed.

Powder also finds texture. A dry patch, a flake, a crease at the outer eye — a matte particle settling into any of those makes it more visible rather than less, because matte in a low point reads as shadow.

What a setting spray does

It makes a film.

The working ingredients are film formers: PVP, VP/VA copolymer, acrylates copolymer and their relatives, carried in water and usually some alcohol that evaporates fast enough to leave the polymer behind without soaking everything underneath it.

That film knits the separate layers on your face into one continuous surface. It reduces transfer onto collars and phone screens, it delays the point at which everything starts sliding, and it takes the flat dusty look off a powdered face by briefly wetting the powder back down into the layer.

What it cannot do is absorb anything. A film sitting over sebum production does not stop sebum arriving. If the complaint is shine at eleven in the morning, spray is the wrong tool, and more of it will not turn into the right one.

So which failure do you have

Two questions, and they are not the same question.

Does it move? Sliding, transferring, breaking up around the nose and the smile lines. That is a spray problem.

Does it shine? That is a powder problem — and specifically powder where the shine is, which for most people is the centre of the face, rather than powder everywhere, which is how a face ends up looking flat and dry in the places that were perfectly fine.

If the answer is both, the order is powder first and spray second. It matters. Powder over an already-set film has nothing to sink into and sits on top looking chalky. Spray over powder puts the whole thing back into one layer.

The alcohol question

A great many setting sprays are heavy on alcohol denat, often inside the first three ingredients.

Its job there is to carry the polymer and get out of the way quickly, and across the twenty seconds a spray takes to dry it is not doing a great deal to skin. But it stings on anything freshly exfoliated, and it is the reason some people find sprays unpleasant and conclude the product is a bad one. It is not a bad one. It has a solvent in it, and there are alcohol-free versions if that matters to you. This is a comfort decision, not a health argument.

The regulatory bit worth knowing

Some setting sprays carry an SPF number.

In the United States, sun protection is a drug claim. A spray with an SPF on it is therefore regulated as an over-the-counter sunscreen and has to carry a Drug Facts panel rather than an ordinary cosmetic label. That part is entirely genuine.

The part worth being careful about is the amount. SPF is measured in the lab at two milligrams per square centimetre — a thick, weighed, deliberately even layer. Nobody achieves that from a fine mist held at arm's length, and the number on the bottle assumes you did. Treat the SPF on a setting spray as a small addition to a proper morning application, not as the reapplication itself.

What neither will do

• Neither fixes dryness. Powder makes a flake more visible; spray makes it a shiny flake. Whatever is causing it is happening earlier in the routine and has to be dealt with there.
• Neither corrects a foundation that is the wrong shade or the wrong finish. They only make it stay.
• Neither makes a heavy application look light. A good deal of what people are trying to lock down is simply too much of it.
• Neither helps with a spot you have been covering and touching all day. If that is the actual situation, a hydrocolloid patch is thin enough to sit under foundation, and it also stops you touching it, which is most of what patches are good for.

The one thing that decides whether this works

How much you put on underneath.

A thin application on a face that was allowed to dry between steps needs almost nothing to hold it in place. A heavy one needs powder and spray and touch-ups and will still be visibly coming apart by mid-afternoon, because you cannot fix the amount of product with more product.

The product

It is the product that made setting spray mainstream, and it is the one people are searching for. Worth noting that it is sold on wear time rather than on shine control, which is an honest description of what a film-forming spray does and does not do.

The one people are searching for is the Urban Decay All Nighter Long-Lasting Makeup Setting Spray.

Urban Decay All Nighter Long-Lasting Makeup Setting Spray

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.