Here’s an Easy Way to Fix That Weird Film on Your Pressed Powder

The worst thing that can happen to a pressed powder, obviously, is dropping it and having it shatter into a million little pieces. I feel a finely milled gut punch just thinking about it. But the second worst thing that can happen to a pressed powder has got to be when it gets those funky, filmy splotches that totally change its texture and make it nearly impossible to pick up product on your brush or puff. No matter how much you think you’re working through it and might whisk it away, it stubbornly persists, creating a literal forcefield that compromises how the product performs and how you look.

Thankfully, makeup artist and all-around hilarious person Genevieve Turley recently shared a brilliant, remarkably easy way to resolve this powder problem, and it’s going to save you so much frustration—and money wasted on thrown-away powder—moving forward.

“Have you got power makeup products that look like this? Like this film over the top, and now they’re not working. They’re not brushing onto your skin, you’re not getting any pickup of color, and it’s very annoying,” Turley says in both an Instagram and TikTok video, using a powder bronzer with that telltale sheen as an example. “That film is often caused by going back onto our face and then back into the product—product, face, face, product. And it’s the buildup of the oils that could be on our skin or makeup that we’re putting back into the powder product, which then creates this film and means we’re not able to then pick up any color.”

She goes on to grab a clean spoolie (spoolies always save the day, don’t they?) and demonstrates exactly how to eliminate the film without losing much product. “What you’re going to do is gently do little circular movements to remove that film. We’re going to be careful now. I don’t want to get it on the carpet now, do I?” she says, lightly scraping the surface. She then shows how well her finger can pick up the bronzer. “And there you see, we’ve got rid of that. So now I can … pick up lots of product. Easy peasy. Quick fix.”