Dior Forever Foundation Just Got A Healthy Boost Of Skincare Ingredients
Resilience, dependability, sustainability and health, or so says Peter Philips – the creative and image director of makeup at Dior Beauty. We speak with the beauty expert on how he’s channelled all that to make the brand’s popular Dior Forever range of foundations even better.
“It was already a very good foundation,” says Peter Philips. The creative and image director of Dior Beauty is talking to four journalists – us, the only representative from Singapore, included – over Zoom about Dior Forever, the high-coverage, long-wearing and transfer-resistant range of foundations that debuted in 2007.
Peter Philips, creative and image director for Dior Beauty
In February, the brand released a new version with an improved formula. For beauty consumers, “reformulation” can be a scary word. If it’s managed poorly, a brand runs the risk of losing dedicated fans and users. In the case of Dior Forever, that’s an, ahem, base that’s been successively built over 15 years. “My main goal was just to make sure that we don’t become worse,” jokes Philips.
Happily, Dior has managed to do more than maintain the status quo. Forever’s big upgrade is an increased amount of skincare content – its highest to date. Floral skincare ingredients now make up 86 per cent of the formula and the concentrations of key extracts – iris, pansy and nasturtium for calming, hydrating and circulatory benefits respectively – are double those in its predecessor. “Eighty-six per cent is a huge step forward,” says Philips.
The secret to Jisoo's luminous complexion: Dior Forever Skin Glow foundation that imbues high perfection to complexion with 24-hour wear while letting it to stay hydrated.
“It’s a tour de force and we did that without compromising on the makeup claims.” In fact, these skincare enhancements mean that the formula of the foundations (30 shades are available here) had to be fine-tuned to ensure that the long-wear and non-transfer properties are – if not at least preserved – improved.
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“The more caring ingredients you add, the more slippery or rich a foundation can become,” explains Philips, and this can be bad news for something that promises a tenacious 24 hours of wear time. To address this, the brand has included structuring agents to help the product better cling to skin, coated pigments to resist humidity, and mattifying powders to absorb excess sweat and sebum.
Dior Forever now boasts the highest amount of skincare ingredients – 86 per cent – used in its formula.
The result is that this latest generation of Dior Forever foundations continues to go onto skin with a natural, luminous finish. “Because of the caring ingredients, it’s actually smoother to apply [as compared with the previous iteration]. And the non-transfer aspect has also really been improved,” adds Philips.
More than anything, the beauty guru was guided by what makeup can offer wearers today. “More than a look, it’s the health factor,” he says. “What people want these days, after what we’ve been through and are still going through, is to radiate health.” And he’s not referring to just the physical aspect – it’s also about one’s state of mind.
“I think putting on makeup is not only about what you see, but also how you feel,” he says. “Many women feel better when they’ve done their makeup in the morning. You wear a good foundation or a great lipstick or whatever you need to feel beautiful and taken care of – that’s important.”
A version of this article first appeared in the March 2022 Liberation edition of FEMALE