Tarte Cosmetics Shape Tape Contour Concealer

It's a matte concealer that easily emphasizes fine lines, texture, or dry patches, so prepping the skin sufficiently is essential. To make it work for me, I place Kiehl's Midnight Recovery oil on my under eyes before dabbing Tarte Shape Tape sparingly and blending it out with a beauty sponge. I like to use this concealer when I want to cover my dark circles on the go without fussing with setting powder, and I don't experience creasing problems. Being matte and high coverage, I find Tarte Shape Tape particularly good for cutting the crease or defining the brows. It has a strong chemical scent, and the packaging box claims it has a shelf life of 6 months. Tarte's shade range leaves much to be desired on the darker end of the spectrum. I am indifferent to the large doe foot applicator, but do see its usefulness for some. Is bigger better? You decide.

Looks quite dry on my under-eyes unless I'm careful about moisturizing deeply and using sparingly. The applicator is large, so I usually use with a separate small concealer brush and feather on the product to keep the product from looking too heavy.

Looks fantastic in photographs, but again, the dryness can be a bit rough in person. Still, the concealer is very high coverage with even just a tiny bit of product and quite brightening, so it's a nice product overall.

I'm a huge concealer girl, since I was blessed with hereditary dark circles and eye bags to boot. I must have tried at least 50 in my lifetime and I'm not THAT old. So when the internet just about burst into flames with this "omg-makes-pandas-look-white" raves, of course I had to try it.

This is not available in my country, so I bought both Light Neutral and Light-Medium for my NC25 skintone. I think if you figure that no one is going to peer at you 5 inches from your face, both are quite good matches. But if I had to pick one, I'd go with Light Neutral. Light-Medium is just a hair darker, ie same shade as my skintone, so better to go lighter for under eye concealing.

Was it everything I thought it would be? Yes...and no.

Yes: It is as opaque as everyone says it is. This one covers almost like paint. So after applying, I look magically awake and bright-eyed. The amazing thing is that as thick as it is, it looks natural and doesn't crease, even after four hours. There was some wear and dark patches had begun to show, but it's as good a cover as I've ever experienced.

But (and there's a but, of course!) the downside about this concealer is that it takes A LOT of effort to apply. Because it's so thick and pasty, I had to spend double the time I usually took just to blend, otherwise my cheeks looked like I walked into a freshly painted wall. This is a huge con because if you think nothing looks worse than having dark circles, it's looking like you have correction tape under your eyes. I was so paranoid about this that it took me forever to get my face ready.

I compared the wear to the other concealers I'm currently using:

Maybelline Fit Me - Tarte won. Maybelline couldn't last beyond 3 hours
Becca compact concealer - Tarte won. Becca started to crease after 4 hours.
Cle de Peau - Tarte won. CDP sadly lost dismally both in coverage and creasing
Giorgio Armani High Precision Retouch - Ties. Both similar in coverage and no creasing

Based on the above results, I'm going to say Shape Tape is good but I get the same results with Armani, so am going to stick with the latter, since application is waaaaaay easier and less time-consuming. The only downside about Armani is the crazy price tag, so choose your poison depending on whether you wanna save money or time :)

EDIT: It finally happened. After trying just about every concealer on the planet, I was convinced that the perfect concealer is like the perfect man - an illusion...until I tried Bourjois Radiance Reveal.

To be honest, I only picked it up because it was on sale, and why not, I only have like 6 other opened concealers. But gosh, this little obscure tube blew Armani out of the water. This one is slightly sheerer than Shape Tape and Armani, but gosh, the result is SO MUCH better. There's a brightening element in there and there's a cooling sensation when you apply it, so my eye area just looks much more awake. It's also a dream to blend (which Shape Tape is not). At my age, I'm starting to get wrinkles but this concealer never settles into lines and after 6 hours, the concealer has not budged. I'm totally gobsmacked that this humble concealer that nobody knows outperforms the big names by a mile.

Do yourself a favour and pick this up.

The only reason why, I started buying this concealer in the first place is due to all the hype it gets. However, I was never 100% loyal towards just sticking with this concealer after buying it, because it's very pricey, and even though I like that it had full coverage, long-wearing, however, I don't think it's worth such a high price tag, also, it has a detectable chemical fragrance (parfum) to it. Which I did put up with due to the pros of this concealer, but, I no longer choose to use any complexion products on my face that have an added chemical fragrance to them. Something that you use on your face should not possess such a major skin irritant, within it. Parfum is meant to go on the body not the face.

Tarte boasts itself about providing products that are natural and that have skin care benefits included that are beneficial towards ones skin, but when I really started to take a good look at the ingredients in a lot of their products, they do have known skin irritants in them, and their makeup products aren't as natural and safe for the skin as they claim. Which is why, I don't choose to buy anything from Tarte anymore. For those that would like an affordable dupe to this concealer, definitely try the E.LF. Camo Concealer, which is fragrance free, btw.

I love the coverage this gives me but it is super drying. I think if you are thirty or older you might want to use something smoother as it looks a bit powdery after a few hours of applying it. I don't really like nor use it alot. I prefer drugstore ones like covergirl ask Maybelline fit me. Hope you find my review helpful. If so please hit the helpful button.

I wish I loved this as much as everybody else did but I just can't quite say that I do. I have really sporadic skin, like sometimes it's dry, but then other times it's super oily. In either case, I find this concealer to be very cake-y and too thick. It dries before I can really blend it in and creases really badly under my eyes. The other problem that I've found is that this oxidizes so so so much. It makes my undereyes look orange. It's even gotten to the point where half of the outside of my tube has started oxidizing and turning orange. Maybe I just got a bad batch, but I think I'll just stick to my NCC.

I was looking for a concealer that could be used for under eye and blemishes, and decided to try this since it’s been so raves about. Sad to say, I’m completely disappointed.

I couldn’t get this to blend right, it looked patchy and clung to areas of skin, emphasised my pores, looked especially horrible around my nose, so I kept trying it out with different primers, foundations and brushes/fingers. Finally, I got a decent result with a Real Techniques sponge. It actually looks pretty good applied on just moisturised skin with no primer underneath, but unfortunately going primer-less is not possible for me. My skin is so oily that I'd be a shining disco ball in less than two hours.

Then I realized it looked awful at the end of the day. This product just does not wear nicely or naturally at all. It fades but doesn’t even have the decency to fade away completely, instead it breaks down looking patchy, and settles into uneven skin textures as well as pores. I do have very oily skin so I don’t expect my makeup to look immaculate all day, but normally it wears away naturally and this just looks terrible. Also, it creases on me very quickly.

I’ll continue to experiment to see if I can find the right combination for this concealer but I’m not hopeful.