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Benefit babes, brace yourself for a bodacious treat. 🙂

Yesterday Benefit Global Beauty Authority Annie Ford-Danielson took a few minutes to chat with me over the phone about their newest product, Hello Flawless Oxygen Wow Liquid Foundation ($34), which arrives on counters this March.

You may remember Annie and her sister Maggie from last year’s B.Right Skin Care launch. Together, they travel the world, working as global ambassadors for the brand.

This marks Benefit’s latest leap into liquid foundations, and Annie, who also works in product development, gave me an inside look at the development process and what we can expect from Hello Flawless Oxygen Wow when it arrives.

The following is an interview with Benefit Global Beauty Authority Annie Ford-Danielson about the brand’s new Benefit Hello Flawless Oxygen Wow Liquid Foundation.

So why did Benefit decide to do a liquid foundation?

Well, I think that at Benefit, as you know, we have kind of a small number of products. We’re not like the MACs or Make Up For Evers, where we have 1500 SKUs, so we have to choose our launches super carefully.

We kind of realized that we’ve done concealers, we’ve done highlighters, Fake-Its, brows, skin care, so the next step to really becoming a one-stop shop for beauty was to create a new liquid foundation.

Our girls, our customers, were coming to us for all of these beauty dilemmas and needs, and the fact that we didn’t have a full assortment of foundations was sending them off to other brands, and of course we want our girls to stay with us.

Annie Ford-Danielson, Benefit Global Beauty Authority

I think that really sparked our interest in making a new line. In true Benefit fashion, I’m sure as you know, we’re all about just quick, easy, instant beauty solutions, and I think that foundation can be hard for a lot of women. It can be super intimidating; it can be laborious, so we wanted to create a formula that was really easy, hydrating and brightening.

When you say brightening, does that mean shimmer?

There’s no shimmer in the foundation itself. It’s called Hello Flawless Oxygen Wow, and the really kind of “Fake It” quality that we’ve given this foundation is that it has an oxygen hydrating complex.

What does this mean? It means it’s going to help boost your cellular respiration, giving your skin a really nice plumping effect, so it’s going to make those fine lines, those little crevices, kind of plump up, giving you that healthy-looking skin. And it also helps protect against environmental stresses. It has vitamin C and E derivatives, which are known to prevent the signs of aging.

My favorite part about this is that it’s oil free but has an SPF 25 PA+++. So what does that all mean? It’s very technical. First of all, the Oxygen Wow complex is completely exclusive to our brand. We created it for our liquid foundation, and basically, what it means is that this is not your traditional liquid foundation. It goes on and has the consistency of a really nice, kind of lightweight tinted moisturizer, but it has the coverage of a foundation.

Can you describe the coverage a little bit?

It’s interesting that you asked. It really depends on the method in which you apply. For example, I apply — I wear it, and I’ve been wearing this foundation because I have connections here and I get it early (laughs). I’ve been traveling so much this year, and everyone’s like, “What’s your favorite product?” and I’m like, “Well, I can’t tell you…because it’s our liquid foundation and we don’t have it [yet].”

So, honestly, it really depends on what you want the foundation to do. On the weekends, I apply it with my fingers, and I just apply half a pump. It kind of gives me a really nice, evening-out effect, but it’s incredibly build-able.

That was one of the main aspects of the foundation that we as a brand felt was important for our customers, because our customers are always telling us, “We want to be able to customize our look. On Sunday, we don’t want to look as decked out as we do on Friday night.” So we figured that to have a formula that was incredibly build-able was the key, so you can go all the way from light, to medium, to medium-full coverage foundation.
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