For footballer's wives and tanning addicts only! (BeneFit You Rebel)

Member Name: glitter_princess

Product:	BeneFit You Rebel
Date:	04/06/09 (180 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: SPF 15

Disadvantages: Little coverage, feels heavy on skin, too orange, makes skin very oily

When it gets really hot in the summer I find that wearing full on foundation can be a bit much and often prefer to opt for the tinted moisturiser look, either buying a proper tinted moisturiser or often mixing my regular foundation with a bit of moisturiser to give a more dewey look. Benefit's You Rebel was one of the first tinted moisturisers I tried and I found it to be one of Benefit's more disappointing products - particularly disappointing considering the £19.50 price tag.

Benefit cosmetics tend to be fabulously kitsch in their packaging and You Rebel lives up to the quirky feel being packaging in a metal paint style bright red tube which is very cute. However, you squeeze the tinted moisturiser out like you would paint or toothpaste which for me is the big flaw in the packaging. The metal material means that once you squeeze, you can't unsqueeze - there's no pressure to draw the liquid back into the tube as there is with plastic squeezy tubes. It's not easy to get exactly the right amount you need out of the tube (which matters less with toothpaste, but more with foundation at £20 a pop!) meaning there can be a lot of wastage. It also means that the packaging looks fabulous in your makeup bag at first, but once you're more than a quarter of the way through the tube, it looks a bit shabby, all wrinkled up at the end.

The tinted moisturiser itself is not what I expected. Most tinted moisturisers are nice and light in texture - You Rebel is very thick and feels far more like a foundation when you apply it, feeling really heavy on the skin, which for me rather defeats the point of using a tinted moisturiser! However, the coverage I would say is little to none - it didn't really even out my skintone or conceal problem areas and I would say my skin would have looked better with just a brief dusting of bronzing powder.

The colour when it comes out of the tube is worryingly dark and although it does go onto the skin lighter, I find it far too orange for my skintone. I'm not an especially pale girl - olive skin and dark hair, a MAC NW20-25 - and this just looks completely unnatural on me due to the orange tone. Although Benefit have recently bought out a paler version of this (You Rebel Light), I'm a bit baffled as to who this is supposed to work for as the shade is very odd - footballers wives and sun bed junkies perhaps, but normal people, no! Benefit claim that this is adaptable to different skin tones but I didn't find this at all - it just stayed the same bizarre orange on me.

The finish did not work for my combination skin at all - if you have extremely dry skin then maybe this would work well for you, but on my it made my whole face way too oily and very very shiny. Not a look you want, especially in summer when oiliness can be a problem anyway. I'm all for a dewey look in summer, but this is greasy, slightly sticky and definitely not a good look! The greasiness also means that it's very difficult to apply powder blush over it - it goes on really patchy and just seems to slip off.

Add to this the rather odd smell to the foundation and you've got yourself an all round Benefit flop! It has a whiff of suntan lotion smell to it, but not the lovely Nivea smell I adore, just quite chemically and not very nice. It does seem to fade on application but is pretty strong those first few minutes of wearing this.

The only benefit (haha, see what I did there?!) of this as far as I'm concerned is that it has an SPF 15, but quite frankly I'd rather stick to my regular moisturiser and just a bit of powder for my summer look rather than look like an oiled up footballer's wife thank you very much!

Summary: Want to look like you've been tangoed? Let me introduce you to You Rebel!