Magic wands

As beauty legends go, Touche Éclat is up there with Eight Hour Cream and Chanel No.5. Perhaps the most copied make-up gismo in the business, this magic wand is the generic for highlighting click-pens.  Designed 20 years ago by the very sympathique Terry de Gunzburg (also creator of luxe range By Terry - a Crone favourite) when she was creative director at YSL, Touche Éclat is a maestro of multi-tasking that really does wake up grim and dingy-looking skin. Crone loves it’s instant eye-lift effect - a dot blended at inner and outer eye corners plus one for luck just under the brow arch lightens weary, blue-tinged shadows, hushes crow’s feet and generally perks up a dreary expression.  Blended around lip contours (with extra attention at the corners) it hides wrinkles, blocks lipstick bleed-off and visually plumps your pout. It can even help ‘soft focus’ smile and chin creases…

Ok, so Crone’s a fan - but she wasn’t at first. Like many of her contemporaries, she expected Touche Éclat to hide rather than hush her many blemishes. (True concealers rely on denser pigments which often contradict light-catching ones) Then there was the shade - a rather tricky pink which suited English rosy skin tones (the UK is traditionally Touche Éclat’s biggest fan base) but left more yellow-toned European skins - including, ironically typically French complexions - rather cold.

But now all that’s been sorted. Thanks to seismic leaps in pigment technology, Touche Éclat now comes in no less than seven shades of radiance to brighten and highlight all skintones - even ebony ones. The encouragingly coined ‘Ampli Light’ technology that makes this breakthrough possible has been nicked from the paint industry, where transparent, light-grabbing pigments are employed to give even deep colour an inner sheen, rather than a brash metallic finish.  

So to practicalities.  YSL’s Northern European makeup artist, Fred Letailleur advises us to finger-blend Touche Éclat for the most natural effect or use the built-in brush for intensified, ‘air-brushed’ radiance.  Mixed with foundation, it gives skin a subtle, all-over glow;  or swept on with a dampened blusher brush,  it gives cheekbones a diffused, heightened highlight or, if you brush a deeper shade underneath, a softly sculpting effect. Fred also mixes it with eyeshadow for a subtle sheeny, creamy. long-lasting finish. Which reminds me. One of Touche ´Éclat’s greatest virtues is its uncanny talent for neutralising red, crinkly-looking lids all on its own. And that really is a magic touch.

• Yves St Laurent Touche Éclat, £24.50, new shades previewing from May 19  in Selfridges, London, Manchester and Birmingham and Brown Thomas, Dublin, Cork, Limerick and Galway; launching nationwide on August 4.