Etude House Fix and Fix Fixer Powder Review

Hi guys! The holiday season is pretty much over, so it’s back to the grind for a lot of us. I received a few gifts from Etude House along with the monthly review product, plus bought a few K-Beauty things on my own, and out of those products this was the one that was requested the most for review – the Etude House Fix and Fix Fixer Powder!

At the time of writing this, Etude House has only one other loose powder – the Zero Sebum Drying Powder, which I own in the old formulation and still love! Having said that, it’s less of a setting powder and more of an oil-control powder. The Fix and Fix Fixer Powder fills that gap in their line, acting as a setting powder to use directly after applying your makeup to keep it locked in all day!

Image from Etude House’s website

This powder claims to be a very finely milled powder that blocks yellow dust/pollution particles from touching your skin, covers pores/textured skin, absorbs sebum, and balances-out skin darkening (I assume it means discoloration).

The first thing that stood out to me was the ingredient list containing only one word – silica. Silica is known to be used by many celebrities for the red carpet because it gives such a flawless skin texture, but it’s infamous for also giving a strong flash-back in photos!

The packaging is very simple, and matches their previous Fix and Fix primer products (reviewed here). The base is transparent so you can see how much powder you have left.

Inside the jar is a thick puff for application…

…and this is what that puff looks like after a few uses. As you can see, it gets dirty pretty quickly due to the material, so frequent washes are necessary.

My issue with the sifter-type jars is that if you use the puff to apply the product to your face directly from the jar it leaves these little dots all over your face. I used my ringlight to take this photo and you can see by the swatch done in the shadow that the flash-back is quite strong.

So, to avoid the dots problem, I tap a bit into the lid of the jar and pat the puff around a few times to blend the powder on it for an even application.

This is what my foundation and concealer looked like immediately after application (I used the Luna Essence Water Pact EX Cushion).

I don’t know why, but since I left Korea I’ve felt like my base products turn yellow whenever I set them with powder ¯\_(ツ)_/¯…ignoring that, you can see how completely smooth my cheek looks now after the application of the powder! No pores or texture in sight. It also did a good job of covering up the blackheads on my nose.

Now for the issues…in the background of the photo you can see it looks like I had a party with some illegal substances 😂. I took these photos in natural lighting with the flash, and you can definitely see the flashback. I found that the less powder I used, logically the less the flashback was. But if you use a light hand and are not going anywhere with strong fluorescent lighting you’ll probably be fine!

As for whether my makeup lasted longer or not…I would say no. You can see by how my skin texture has returned and my foundation has bunched up around my nose that my makeup was pretty much gone after just 5 hours. This is completely normal for me with any powder I’ve used, as I’ve found over the past few months that without a very sticky primer my skin just rejects foundation! Having said that, for a powder that claims to help your makeup last longer, it didn’t really do that for me.

•○ Final Thoughts ○•

I think the best thing about this powder is that it 100% dupes one of the most famous loose powders of all time, the Make Up For Ever Ultra HD Microfinishing Loose Powder, at a MUCH cheaper price!!! You can get basically the exact same product for 9,000 KRW / 10g, when the MUFE one is $36.00 USD (37,000 KRW) for only 8.5g – a huge deal!

I personally have found that the powder does a great job at blurring my skin, but I’ve had to work with finding a balance to get it so it’s not too powdery. If you’re able to find that balance you get GREAT results, so I’m quite happy with this!

I’m so happy I got this post up on the first day of the year! It feels symbolic, somehow 😍. I’m not sure what I’ll review next but I hope you guys will stick around for my content in 2018, since I love your feedback and comments ❤️. Until then~ (✿´꒳`)ﾉ°

*This product was given to me as an extra gift by Etude House, but all opinions are my own.

Advertisement