Makeup affecting your skin? Try daytime slugging

A well-kept Asian beauty secret explained

BEAUTYcrew Beauty Editor / February 21 2022

Hands up who loves skin care? Yup, same. What about a full face of makeup? Yeah, us too.

But you know what we don’t love? The constant game of tug and war between these two opposing forces in beauty. 

There just has to be a solution for this age-old feud between skin care and makeup, right?

Well, it turns out there is, and it’s actually pretty bloody simple. 

You’ve probably heard the term slugging being bandied about by skin care obsessives online.

The skin care philosophy employs emollient-textured skin care products (most famously Vaseline) to act as a barrier between the skin and the outside world. 

The result? Skin is protected from environmental aggressors while you sleep and moisture retention is optimised too. 

And according to Fiona Co Chan, founder of Youthforia, the same principle can be applied to your daytime skin care routine prior to slapping on your foundation. 

Chan’s revelatory education in all things slugging stems from an obsession with the flawless skin and makeup of women in Asia. 

The 30-year-old just couldn’t understand the correlation between the clarity of their skin, despite their apparent penchant for a full face of makeup. 

That is until Chan went to makeup school and found out “that they use a daily protective primer for daytime slugging to seal in their skin care and protect skin from makeup,” she explained on TikTok. 

Now, given that Chan has founded her own line of cutting edge makeup (like the Youthforia BYO Blush), it’s only natural that she’d offer a protective primer formula of her own.

Enter: Youthforia Pregame Primer ($38 USD at Youthforia).

 

Youthforia Pregame Primer

According to Chan’s TikTok account, the primer is “very lightweight”, but still possesses the emollient texture found in traditional Asian protective primers, ensuring that it “seals in all of your skin care during the day.”

The only gripe we have is that the US-based brand doesn’t offer returns or exchanges on international shipping.

Want to test Chan’s theory? Here are some daily protective primers we recommend (that are a little easier to get your hands on):


Tatcha The Silk Canvas Protective Primer ($78 at MECCA); NARS Smooth & Protect Primer ($54 at MECCA); and e.l.f Cosmetics Poreless Putty Primer ($17 at e.l.f Cosmetics).

Tatcha The Silk Canvas Protective Primer

NARS Smooth & Protect Primer

e.l.f Cosmetics Poreless Putty Primer

Now that you’re finessing your makeup routine, it’s time to get your lashes on the same level. Here are three ways to nail the floating lashes trend. 

Main image credit: @jennierubyjane

Briar Clark got her start in the media industry in 2017, as an intern for Marie Claire and InStyle. Since then, her keen interest in fashion and beauty has landed her gigs as a Digital Content Producer and Beauty Editor with titles like Girlfriend, Refinery29, BEAUTYcrew and beautyheaven. She loves the way seemingly innocuous topics like skin care and style have the ability to put a smile on people’s faces or make them think about themselves a little differently. A big believer in self love and experimentation, Briar has made a point of becoming the Australian beauty industry’s unofficial guinea pig for unusual treatments and daring hair trends. When she’s not testing out the latest beauty launches, Briar is big on broadening her horizons, mostly in the form of food but she’s also partial to travelling to new destinations both near and far (and of course, allocating an extra bag to bring their best beauty offerings home with her).