Bourjois Delice de Poudre Bronzing Powder Review

I'm supposed to be ironing. I'll just wait for the iron to heat up.... blah blah blah....

Actually I'm in no mood for anything today. I'm jetlagged. The clocks went forward an hour and for some reason that hour of sleep I missed this morning is really taking its toll on me today. It's pathetic, I know. God knows what I'm going to be like when I go to the States later this year.
So I thought I'd do something mildly useful (while the iron heats up,  hehehehe) and review the Bourjois bronzer that I picked up a few weeks ago, seeing as days like today are when I need bronzer the most.

This is what it looks like to begin with......but......

This cute little product has been around for a while but I didn't take much notice of it until I saw a few YouTube gurus raving on about how great it was and using it regularly in tutorials. It's not that expensive.... well, not in the UK anyway. For some bizarre reason it costs about €11-12 euros over here whilst in the UK it's about £6.99, but you can probably get it cheaper with all the special offers and 3 for 2 deals that are so frequently on.

It looks like a little quad of chocolate encased in a mini book and it even smells of chocolate. To be precise, like a very sweet chocolate powder drink, but definitely not unpleasant. I chose the slightly darker shade, number 52. The paler one, number 51 looked like it wouldn't have had that much effect.

I tried using the powder with my big Body Shop powder brush, but it didn't really pick up much colour, I think because it's such a soft brush and in my experience Bourjois powder products need a bit of a denser, rougher brush to pick up the colour (the blushes are terrible for this, I can't get any colour from them unless I use the horrible little scratchy applicator they come with).

When I went to Paris I picked up a special bronzer brush from Sephora (separate review on this to come).  This brush proved much more successful at picking up the colour BUT I noticed that after 2-3 swipes the bronzer kind of 'sealed' over with a shiny layer which prevented me from picking up any more colour. This meant that I had to scratch off a thick layer of the product in order to get to the underneath where it wasn't all shiny.

I've been using it every day for about 3 weeks, and every day the shiny layer appears after a few swipes, preventing me from picking up any more colour. It's getting really REALLY annoying. My beautiful chocolate quad now looks like it's been hacked and massacred by all the scraping I've had to do to be able to use it. I've tried cleaning my brush and powdering my skin beforehand but to no avail.

...... this is what I've ended up with. Horribly scrapped and with a mysterious 'sheen' which you can just about see in this photo.

It is such a shame, because the colour is just lovely once it's on the skin and it really does impart a healthy natural glow. It's a matte bronzer with the teensy gold sparkles in it but these are not noticeable on the skin. The packaging is lovely, light and easy to pop into your make-up bag. I'm a bit gutted it hasn't worked for me, but I'll continue to use it until it runs out or until it drives me so mad that I bin it and get the Chanel one I've been hankering after for so long!

Right, that iron must be scorching by now.... 

Score: 5/10