Finally! A luxury beauty brand exclusively for (and tested on) 40+ women - and I've tried 3 hero products
Sarah Creal Beauty's smudge-proof liner and perfect concealer are so worth shouting about
Sarah Creal is the most famous beauty mogul you've never heard of. But industry types usually have. The highly respected co-founder and former CEO of Victoria Beckham Beauty has had what I'd call a megacareer, leading beauty product development at Tom Ford, Estée Lauder and Prada, amongst many, many others.
After leaving VB in 2022, Creal was pondering her next move and had an epiphany: no luxury beauty brand was specifically creating products for women aged 40+. Madness, when you consider the enthusiasm and - no point dancing around it - spending power of grown-up consumers.
And so work began on her eponymous line, aiming to excite, inspire, and serve women Creal's own age. Think: the best tubing mascara that never smudges, or non-sticky skincare-infused lip gloss. It's already making waves in the US, and now that it's landed in the UK, I can see why.
Testing is on faces aged 40-65 only; advertising is too, and the resulting luxury makeup and skincare line is beyond excellent. So excellent, in fact, that instead of my usual Sunday Service schtick of telling you the one thing you should buy, I'm going to mention three.
Probably Creal's most hyped product - because my god, isn't a great concealer worth its weight in gold? This one is somehow both creamy and very hydrating, but also robustly pigmented. It feels slightly thicker than your average, but also, as the name suggests, is very flexible and seems to move with you so it doesn't sink into lines at all. It wears beautifully, doesn't oxidise and doesn't dry out all day long. It also contains all the best eye cream ingredients - caffeine, green tea, aloe - skin-perking, soothing, hydrating things. If you forced me to give up every product from the range but one, I'd keep this, but thankfully no such ultimatum has been presented because...
This is the liner my hooded eyes have been waiting for. It is everything a mature lid needs: it draws on smoothly and doesn't drag, it's initially smudgable if you prefer to smoke it out, but then it sets down and will not transfer or melt away at all. Not at all. I say this as someone with oily skin and hooded eyelids for whom 90% of liners simply don't work. The shades are really beautiful too, all brown-ish basically, nothing wild. I tried Golden, Bronzy and Twilight Smoke and loved every single one. Also - how swish is the little blending brush on the end?
I've written a lot about tubing mascaras and how good they are for mature eyes, simply because they never transfer. It is so nice to go out and just trust that's what's going on, not constantly check mirrors for lash imprints. These formulas also give a natural, elegant look, rather than an OTT spidery one. This ticks all of the above boxes beautifully, has a lovely jet-black, silky-looking finish, and the wand has all different sizes of bristles to get into various bits of your lash line. This has shot right to the top of my tubing mascara league table (and it's a long list)
As ever in my Sunday Service to you, I like to give a little demonstration of whatever product I'm rhapsodising about can do. So behold, my frankly quite knackered, underslept bare face (I'd been in Ibiza!), then wearing Creal's concealer, liner and mascara. An improvement, non?
Of course, most makeup can put on a decent show when freshly applied in a photo, but the thing I can't stress enough is how well these products perform. That's the secret sauce and what Creal instinctively understands about her audience - we want stuff that works and keeps on working.
In the words of Sarah herself, "None of us wants to apply eye makeup only to see that, an hour later, we look like we don’t know how! We do; it’s just that as we have evolved, so have our routines, and often the formulas we are using are counteracting one another. Our features have also changed, and we want and need more from our products."
If there's one thing most women get better at, into our 40s and beyond it's asking for more of what we need. This feels like the makeup range we've been crying out for, and it truly delivers the goods. Sounds good? Great! Let's chat next Sunday.
