The Super-Easy Makeup Hack For A Crease-Free Under-Eye

If there is one thing you can trust to go wrong with your makeup, it is for your concealer to crease halfway through your day. Despite the myriad hacks out there to keep this makeup disaster from happening, most of them do not actually work — at least for most of us. Sometimes, setting your concealer immediately leads to cakey-looking creasing, and small amounts of concealer do not always provide you with the coverage you want.

If you haven't yet thought about changing the tool you use for blending your under-eye concealer, you definitely should. Lately, the talk of the town (or more specifically, the beauty side of TikTok) has been the unlikely method of blending your concealer not with the tools that are made for the task, such as beauty sponges and concealer brushes, but with a powder puff instead.

Even TikTok beauty influencer Meredith Duxbury raves about this simple hack, telling Glamour, " ... if anybody wants an under eye that's not creased and just super smooth, I would suggest trying to blend it out with a powder puff." 

The hack is simple: Blend your under-eye concealer with a triangular powder puff instead of your fingers or usual makeup tools. While it might seem too good to be true, makeup influencers have been hopping on this trend for its efficiency in blending and ability to give you that seemingly unachievable smooth creaseless look.

The way it works, essentially, is the same as a makeup sponge's blending technique. Once you have your concealer sitting the way you like it underneath your eyes — be it a few dots, an upside-down triangle, or a few streaks — you can begin tapping your powder puff over the product, back and forth, until it is fully blended into your skin. Then, you may use the same puff or a different one to apply powder on top as usual. The end result? "The powder puff doesn't absorb any of the product and it just blends it in really smoothly. And the concealer had such a nice smooth finish," says Meredith Duxbury, per Glamour.

As beauty TikToker Yanna Machorro confirms, when it comes to blending concealer, "Powder puffs for the win." We couldn't agree more. But why does it work?

Because a powder puff is traditionally (and as intended) used for loose and pressed powder products, the tool doesn't work the way regular beauty sponges do. That is, they don't absorb as much product as a sponge would, so they are able to spread concealer more evenly. Because sponges inevitably soak up some of your product (alas, the nature of sponges is to soak up), they also tend to take away some of the coverage you want. A typical velour powder puff won't do this, meaning your coverage will all still be there once you're done.

But how does it prevent creasing? "A powder puff gently locks in makeup without the tugging or streaking of a brush, giving an overall more flawless finish," makeup artist Nikki La Rose-Bonaldi explains to Byrdie. By allocating the product evenly, rather than allowing it to pile up in places and spread too thinly in others, the powder puff results in an ultra-smooth under-eye area that is much less likely to crease, especially when combined with setting powder.