This Skin Tint Is So Good, I Stopped Using Foundation & Highlighter

I learned very early on that tinted moisturizer was not for me. As a young adult, I broke my beauty budget to splurge on a tinted moisturizer that shall not be named, whose luminous, effortless finish everyone around me was obsessed with, only to be heartbroken when it did nothing for me. It couldn’t even slightly camouflage the spots of hyperpigmentation left behind from acne breakouts, so I just went back to my trusty matte Maybelline foundation. I gave up tinted moisturizers and have remained a steadfast foundation girlie ever since.

That is, until I met Yummy Skin Serum Skin Tint, which was launched this year by Danessa Myricks Beauty. Myricks is a self-taught makeup artist who’s always prided her brand on making products for people who haven’t always been the beauty industry’s ideal target consumers. Her shimmery eye shadows and highly pigmented cheek products have gained cult status amongst beauty editors and makeup aficionados alike, and this year, her Blurring Balm Powder went viral on Tiktok — but the Yummy Skin Tint is a sleeper hit that should get just as much, if not more, attention. The first time I tried this product, I immediately fell in love. Read on for my full review.

Fast Facts:

• Price: $36
• Best for: All skin types
• Your rating: 5/5
• Brand: Danessa Myricks Beauty
• Clean/Cruelty-Free: Yes
• What we like: Sheer, but significant coverage and blurring properties
• What we don’t like: We wish it were fully fragrance-free

My Skin

Over the years, I’ve been able to move from full-coverage foundation to medium coverage, as my skin graduated from its acneic era only to enter its redness epoch. I have a lot of diffused redness in my cheek area and some pigmentation around my mouth, and I find that foundation is preferable to concealer to lightly blur these issues without making my skin look like it has too much frosting.

Up until now, tinted moisturizer was a product category I could only fantasize about. I thought of it as something that made perfect-skinned girls look even more perfect, and that category didn’t include me. I’ve tried several different ones over the years, but I was always underwhelmed and would end up retreating to the safety of coverage-forward makeup bases.

Danessa Myricks Yummy Skin Serum Skin Tint

This tint is the platonic ideal of a hybrid in more ways than one: It’s a true skin-care-meets-makeup hero, and a tinted moisturizer with the ambitious coverage of a foundation.

In the skin care realm, it’s loaded with vegan collagen peptides that smooth textured skin and plump fine lines; squalane, which mimics the skin’s natural oils, making it a potent hydrator; and everyone’s favorite plumping ingredient hyaluronic acid is in here, along with ceramides to reinforce the skin barrier.

As a makeup product, it comes with enough pigment load to cover minor imperfections and blur more significant ones. It comes in 16 flexible shades, which means that you can use a shade lighter or darker than your exact skin tone and not notice a difference.

The Results

From a coverage perspective, any light-to-medium coverage foundation could do what this product does. But what makes this tint special is its IRL filter-like finish. I have textured skin, and wearing this makes me feel super confident in that my redness and pigmentation concerns are diminished and my skin looks smoother — like it’s draped in a blurring veil.

So confident am I in this product that I’ve stopped wearing foundation completely. I wore this all through the summer without feeling too slick, even on the hottest of days. On super-humid days however, I did tap my T-zone with some Yummy Skin Blurring Balm Powder, another stand-out product from the same brand, that helped suck up any excess oil to keep things glowy, not greasy.

I now use the tint even when I want to look visibly made-up and polished for evening events. It’s so buildable that I do two thin layers for a flawless visage. I definitely still need concealer for my under eye area, but skip it everywhere else. It veils the pigmentation around my mouth well enough not to bother me, but those with more noticeable variation in pigmentation might want to layer a color corrector underneath or a concealer on top.

But what we need to stop the presses for is this: I’ve even stopped using highlighter. Rarely have I used foundation without tapping on a natural-looking cream or liquid sheen over my makeup to mimic a dewy skin-like finish. Ever since I started using this tint, I haven’t felt the need to pop a highlight on. The glow-up is so powerful, yet so effortlessly natural, that nothing compels me to mess with it.

The Praise

Danessa Myricks has her fair share of celebrity makeup artist fans, but one mega-name is Sir John, one of the industry’s leading makeup artists who regularly works with the likes of Beyoncé, Joan Smalls, and Coco Rocha. “The Yummy Skin Serum Skin Tint really offers up a supernatural glow, with its 'skin first' approach,” he says. He used the product while keying shows for New York and Paris fashion weeks, and this was his top tip: “What I love to do with this product is layer it over skin care, and if more coverage is needed, I will dial it up with an egg sponge and a liquid foundation or concealer for a really sexy glow.”

It gives me a little thrill that a makeup artist who’s been operating at the highest level of artistry for 20 years loves this product as much as me. “Coming from someone who has seen it all, Danessa Myricks continues to capture what true makeup artists, beauty enthusiasts, and makeup aficionados are looking for and need,” he says. As someone who’d been waiting for a product like this for years, I couldn’t agree more.