Make-up, hair and perfume primers: do you really need all of them?

The first step in most beauty routines is no longer the first step. Shampoo has a prep step, and so do mascara, eye shadow, lipstick, nail polish and – as of fairly recently – perfume, turning prep products into their own aisle, all built on the idea that what you put on first changes what happens to everything after it. Primer got there before anything else. Silicone-based film formers were a make-up artist’s answer to a make-up artist’s problem: skin that had to hold up under lights, through a...