Review & Comparison: Rouge Bunny Rouge Diaphanous Powder vs MUFE HD Powder

So I guess the last year or two, luminous finishing powders were the thing. Hourglass came out with their Ambient Lighting Powders – and a palette that was so popular it was going for 2-3x its retail cost on ebay – and Guerlain Meteorites got reformulated for more awesomeness. This year seems to be all about translucent. Make Up For Ever’s HD powder has been around forever, of course, but it recently got a new and much less frustrating jar, and Givenchy’s Poudre Premiere is out now too, with rave reviews (you can see one from Mostly Sunny here). But I’m in the middle of a new brand obsession, so of course the latest addition to my stash of powders is the new Rouge Bunny Rouge Diaphanous Impalpable Finishing Powder. When I posted up swatches of the RBR face products a while ago, naturally the very first question I got  was about how it compares to MUFE HD and sadly I didn’t have that in my possession at the time. But it got me thinking, and wondering, and pondering… so I picked up a travel size of MUFE HD to compare. Let the battle of the powder commence, I guess.

Packaging

Now, clearly the containers I have are two different sizes – I have the full size (7g) of the Rouge Bunny Rouge Powder, and the travel size (4g) of the MUFE HD. For the curious, the full size MUFE HD powder is 8.5g, so slightly more than RBR’s version. The packaging, as far as I can tell, is pretty much identical. You have a clear jar with sort of a black bowl that bottoms out in a stretchy panty-hose-like mesh. When you press your brush into the mesh, a little bit of powder escapes through it and lands on your brush. It takes a little bit of getting used to, because you just barely get a tiny dusting of product on your brush – which is the point, of course. With both of them, one press of the brush into the ‘pan’ is enough to do about half my face.

Both lids have a kind of column in the center that sits on top of the mesh, presumably keeping powder from making a huge mess everywhere if it’s not sitting perfectly still on your vanity. I haven’t tested these with travel yet, though if I shake the jars some powder definitely escapes into the bowl. Side note for the Muji-obsessed like me: neither jar is flat enough to fit in the small Muji drawers, so both of these sit out on my vanity. For purely decorative purposes I prefer the Rouge Bunny Rouge jar.

Color

Well this section is kind of pointless for this product, isn’t it? It’s white in the jar and clear on your face, unless you just massively overapply it. I did test both of these for flashback with flash photography, and when applied as intended (ie, just a little bit) there were no issues. Piling it on did cause some flashback, but overall I wouldn’t expect it to be an issue unless you’re using way too much or applying it over bare skin.

Texture, application & wear

The differences between these two powders are subtle, but important. They may look identical in the jar, but the ingredient list is most certainly not.

MUFE HD Powder Ingredients:

SILICA

Rouge Bunny Rouge Diaphanous Impalpable Finishing Powder Ingredients:

SILICA, TALC, CAPRYLYL GLYCOL, BORON NITRIDE, MICA, PHENOXYETHANOL, POTASSIUM SORBATE, HEXYLENE GLYCOL, BUTYLENE GLYCOL, GLYCERIN, MALTODEXTRIN, SUCROSE DILAURATE, LAUROYL LYSINE, AQUA (WATER), SODIUM COCOYL GLUTAMATE, ENANTIA CHLORANTHA BARK EXTRACT, PISUM SATIVUM EXTRACT (PISUM SATIVUM (PEA) EXTRACT), CARBOMER, SODIUM LACTATE, POLYSORBATE 20, OLEANOLIC ACID, PALMITOYL OLIGOPEPTIDE, PALMITOYL TETRAPEPTIDE-7

So right off the bat you can see they’re not really going to be the same. Both are primarily silica, which absorbs oil and reflects light, but RBR has some additional goodies. According to CosDNA a few of the ingredients (caprylyl glycol, glycerin, sodium lactate) are moisturizing, which I think probably is a big contributor to how the powders behave throughout the day. The difference isn’t hugely apparent unless you’re looking for it, but in my split-face tests (sample size: 1) the MUFE side looked more powdery and patchy earlier in the day, and looked worse than the RBR side by the time I took my makeup off at night. Others might not notice as much of a difference, but my skin is easily dehydrated, so powders that suck moisture out of my skin are no bueno, and MUFE seems to fall into that category. It can be really tricky to keep my makeup from getting a little too ‘glowy’ without overdoing it, but Rouge Bunny Rouge manages to accomplish just that. Unfortunately I didn’t do my half-face test runs on yoga day, but I was pleasantly surprised to see that the Diaphanous powder kept my face matte after an hour in an un-air-conditioned dance studio, so there’s that.

More importantly, the Rouge Bunny Rouge powder blends more seamlessly into my skin and makes it look more flawless. I had to break out my ‘very serious photographer’ macro lense to capture the difference between them on the skin, but I think this shows the difference pretty well:

I ended up adding marks with the an eyeliner pencil, because I kept zooming the RBR swatch on my camera and thinking that half of the image wasn’t in good focus. Nope. It was just that the Rouge Bunny Rouge powder blurs out the texture in my skin, whereas the MUFE HD powder sort of settles into fine lines. The MUFE version also leaves a bit of a white cast when it’s applied over bare skin (as it was here), while RBR doesn’t.

In Short: Rouge Bunny Rouge is a teeny bit more expensive, but it’s also the hands-down winner as far as I’m concerned.

Rouge Bunny Rouge Diaphanous Impalpable Finishing Powder ($41) is available at beautyhabit.com and Make Up For Ever HD Powder ($34) is available at sephora.com