You beauty! YSL Le Teint Touche Eclat foundation

Do you sometimes look in the mirror and feel that your face is a bit… forsaken? Forsaken by light. As though, however balmy the evening or sparkling the morning, your face just reflects gloom and shadow back at you? That the light somehow brands you rather than bathes you? Oh, the gloom of it makes my shoulders sag.

But I have a magic wand in my hand. It is the big sister of YSL’s revolutionary Touche Éclat highlighter pen, which I once tried to paint my entire face with. Le Teint Touche Éclat foundation launched last year and it doesn’t so much cover your face as embrace it, inspire it, discreetly empower it...

I have trouble with foundation. I almost always find it chalky and crevice-hugging, mask-like and unconvincing. But the opaque powders present in traditional foundation have, in Le Teint, been replaced by a sort of soft-focus gel that forms a smoothing film over the skin’s surface. It airbrushes you.

And the flashy mother-of-pearl pizzazz that many brightening foundations employ has been cast aside for a golden pigment that acts like a million mirrors, all reflecting back at each other in a silent symphony of light diffusion.

I rub it in carelessly like moisturiser and it vanishes; there is no geisha-like blank canvas that needs blusher and bronzer to humanise and to contour. Just skin. Good skin. My good skin.

YSL Le Teint Touche Éclat foundation, £29, at selfridges.com