Hakansson skin praise

Here’s a small note of something I rarely speak about – make-up. The reason for such a post is not a one-minute frenzy, but several years of experience.
If fashion may be subject to seasonal moodswings, make-up is something that I keep quite constant only occasionally adding something different or crazy…you’ve seen it – black lipstick, sky-blue eyelashes, red eye-liner – those things that I tend to entertain you with at times. …but there’s only one base and skin-care routine that makes a perfect blank canvas for all those experiments – it’s Håkansson.


Håkansson is a Swedish brand with a seemingly narrow range, but the beauty of every product is that it can multitask and the possibilities are endless. They have a basic skin-care range where I’m addicted to Remover Soap Moisturiser routine, and I never owned the Oil, but having received a tiny sample I’m inclined to giving it a try. The make-up range consists of Colours and Finishes – that’s were it becomes so much fun. The consealer (or rather the flesh-tone colours) has 100% coverage, it’s really like those professional products they use for theatre or TV, except that it’s silky soft on your skin, but it will hide absolutely anything on any part of your face…so that’s firstly: those colours become base, blush, lipstick, and eyeshadow as you wish. I’m always lost at the make-up stands that try to convince me that I need five different tubes just to hide bags under my eyes, and I later find out that I’ve never had any bags or dark circles or whatever else they invent that we girls have = marketing! Håkansson does it otherwise – gives you a raw product of greatest quality and lets you find the way to use it. All colours come in doubles, they are perfectly mixable. I’ve always had colours 1+2 and 7+8, where the first set works as consealer and the second one as colour. I’m very tempted to try the dark red+orange combination, but at the moment I’m staying loyal to my M.A.C. Lady Danger lipstick…but never say never.

Now, the Finish part is easy, it’s basically only one pot of powder with a suspicious yellow undertone. The trick with yellow is that it breaks any red on your skin – so there go the last traces of any spots, pimples or whatever the consealer did not cover – invisible! The magic yellow powder is said to suit all skin-tones…I can’t object since it suits me perfectly. Probably the only problem is that this make-up is made for white or asian girls – the colours are pretty light, so if for instance colour nr. 3 can be someone’s consealer, I’m not sure they can make a good use of the Powder…may be that’s a question to ask to the Swedish-born and New York-based Katarina Håkansson – the make-up artist who has actually created the entire range.

To conclude this dépêche on Håkansson make-up I must say that I’m the happiest customer ever and I will always be. The products may be pricy, so re-stocking my make-up bag happens gradually, this month I get the powder and colour, next month the new bottle of moisturiser – these are the products that last. The only downside probably is that not all of Håkansson products are Paraben-free…but here’s my experience: I discovered Håkansson through COS, they used to sell the whole range in the beginning, but then stopped and while I was still working for COS the products were sold to all the employees with a massive 70% reduction, so I bought two of each products I needed and have been using it happily eversince; then I ran out of some things and tried to buy them online, but there was no delivery outside US (strangely though, the recent package was sent from Sweden); so I tried to find a substitute – Bare Essentuals was not too bad but also only available in France, the new biological brand Une was ok in the beginning, but then I developed a horrid allergy to it, just like to most other brands. The moral: I’d rather buy paraben that scratch my face to blood, so I stopped looking for yet another wannabe ecological brand and celebrated my re-union with Håkansson after one year and a half, now hopefully forever.