Want to know a magic trick?

You guys, I'm really tired. Early train, lots of walking, busy weekends so I can't sleep in. I seriously don't know how other people do it.

Luckily, it's much less obvious lately that I'm dragging my feet all the time. I have added something new to my routine: the illuminating concealer (fanfare!).

The classic illuminating concealer is the YSL Touche Eclat Radiant Luminizer, which beauty editors and make-up artists and celebrities swear by. And I always thought, "Man, that is expensive, I don't know..." Plus the fact that I'd have to go to a counter and ask to test it... I opted out. Mistake? Probably. But then Sephora started to carry YSL this fall, and so I thought, why not? It was my first weekend in the city, I'd spent all day moving, and I was meeting some of my coworkers for drinks at a swanky bar. Why not swipe some fancy shimmery concealer under my eyes? (Because it could have turned out gruesome. Luckily, this is not a story where things turned gruesome.) Instead, I blinked in amazement and wonder. Oh, I get it now!

But I didn't jump and buy the Touche Eclat. For one, they were out of the color I wanted. For another, I already had the Dior SkinFlash Radiance Booster Pen, which I'd bought at a Dior makeover event earlier this year. I'd seen Lilan of the Daily Cookie's post about visiting with Nordstrom's Beauty Director about Dior products, and so I asked the artist to show me SkinFlash. I wound up taking it home, but didn't actually use it until this fall. I like it a lot (I have it in 002, Candlelight), but it occurred to me that it's actually technically more expensive than Touche Eclat -- yes, it's less expensive overall, but you get .05 oz in SkinFlash versus .1 oz for Touche Eclat. Yeah, you're paying seven bucks less... for half the product.

That said, I have to admit I'm not a huge fan of click-pen products, whether it's a concealer pen or a lip gloss. I always wind up clicking it forever just to get the initial flow going, then get a big gooey mess when it suddenly starts oozing out the brush all over the place. (I'm not the only one that happens to, right?) Plus dropping at least $33 for an illuminating concealer is a lot of money, even if you do use it every day. Stila has an illuminating concealer as well that comes in a non-click format -- it's a tube with a little brush, like a lip gloss. Plus it's cheaper at $22, and comes in a wider variety of colors. How it holds up to Touche Eclat and SkinFlash, I'm not sure, but I'm curious.

So yeah: illuminating concealers! Magic! (Illusions!) Thumbs up from Jeanne.

image from sephora.com