As a longtime beauty writer, I’m often asked about drugstore beauty products: Do I really need to spend money on products to get good results? Are the inexpensive versions just as good as what I get at a department store? Would you wear a drugstore foundation? I recently had the idea of trying similar foundations on my face side by side to sort out the practical differences. For my experiment, I paired up four different mass-market and prestige products with similar textures, finishes, ingredients, and benefits. In fact, I walked around all day with a different serum foundation on each side of my face, and the difference between the two was so subtle that no one would ever know. (My detailed testing notes are included below, by the way.) The very similar results left me with even more questions. So I reached out to Marisa Plescia, a cosmetic chemist and the president of the board of directors for the Society of Cosmetic Chemists, and Ashlee Glazer, celebrity makeup artist and beauty expert, to finally figure out the difference between drugstore and fancy foundations.
In short, not really. “From a chemist standpoint, the process of creating a foundation for mass or prestige is really the same,” says Plescia. “It just depends on what the product is supposed to do.” Many mass-market brands are owned by the same parent companies behind luxury labels and have access to the same research, development, and manufacturing expertise. “Consumers may notice a difference in texture or finish, but that doesn’t mean the one formula is objectively better than the other,” says Plescia.
