This blush-bronzer is the perfect summer beauty product
I am very pleased with today's column because I think I have found the perfect summer product. It is a blush-bronzer hybrid, It Cosmetics Glow with Confidence Sun Blush (£33, johnlewis.com), and it is so good — the best thing I've come across in years when it comes to making you look healthy, natural and sunkissed.
It's a cream and it comes in five shades. The one that I am raving about specifically is called Sun Warmth. I am reasonably confident that it is almost a universal shade, though you might need an extremely light hand if you are the colour of photocopying paper. (Do people still photocopy things or just scan them with their phones? I am old enough to remember when people photocopied their bottoms at drunken office parties. Good times.)
On the other hand, IT Cosmetics knows what it's doing and so presumably the shades it deems best for fairer or darker skin work just as well. But Sun Warmth! Sun Warmth is literally perfection. It's a sort of brickish terracotta shade, and on the skin it is exactly — exactly — the colour skin goes just before it burns: that optimal shade that looks amazing for one night only, before it goes red and peels. Do you know what I mean? It's a colour that looks like your skin has absorbed all the heat and sunlight of the day, and that makes everybody much better looking than they actually are, because it evokes fresh air and light and carefreeness and joy.
Also, lack of effort. This is a product that looks like the results just happened without any input by you. Products that do this are my favourites and they're also few and far between. In this instance, genius colour aside, the texture has a lot to do with it. It presents as solid in the pot, but it melts on to the skin like a sort of balm — I think we could technically call it a balm, except that 'balm' suggests something that will slide off and this won't.
Anyway: its balminess means that you could apply it with your eyes closed and it would still look great. Don't, obviously — apply it with your eyes open a) on your cheekbones and/ or cheeks (higher is better if you're older, because otherwise the colour is too low down when your face is in repose), b) on your temples, c) wherever the sun would naturally hit, including maybe the tip of your nose. The brickish colour of this means that I like applying it in a sort of blurred-out stripe across the centre of my face, from cheekbone to cheekbone and across the nose. With a light hand! Honestly, it is so flattering that I almost laughed out loud in delight. I would suggest using quite a stiff brush rather than anything superfluffy, in a dabbing/stippling motion — but do whatever works best for you.
It contains skincare too. To be honest I wouldn't care if it contained weasel pee and chopped up worms, so pleasing is its effect on the skin, but skincare is a nice thing obviously. Skincare is the cherry on the cake. Here we have hyaluronic acid for hydration, vitamin E to feed the skin and our trusty friends peptides, who do everything helpful. What a product! I could not love it more. The pot is huge, by the way, and will last you for ever. PS If you're looking for something to wear underneath, the same brand's CC+ Nude Glow (£38, boots.com), which I have written about before, is very good.
Cook For the Love of Lemons by Letitia Clark (Hardie Grant £28) is a single-theme — lemons! — cookbook that is summer between hard covers. The recipes are Italian or Italianish and lend themselves particularly well to lunch outside under a parasol. timesbookshop.co.uk
The Sunday Times Style Beauty awards are back for 2025. You could win a luxury five-star holiday at Sani Resort in Greece, plus we have more than £25,000 worth of beauty prizes up for grabs. To be entered into the prize draw, vote for your favourite products at thetimes.com/stylebeautyawards
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The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines the verb to plagiarise as follows: '1 v.t. Take and use as one's own (the thoughts, writings, inventions, etc., of another person); copy (literary work, ideas, etc.) improperly or without acknowledgement; pass off the thoughts, work, etc., of (another person) as one's own. 2 v.i. Practise or commit plagiarism.' Damien Hirst, who has been accused, not for the first time, of pinching the idea for his best work, A Thousand Years (1990) — the one with the cow's head, the maggots and the insect-o-cutor in a vitrine — from his Goldsmiths contemporary Hamad Butt, is probably used to it by now. Indeed, in 2018 he stated in a filmed interview with fellow artist Peter Blake, 'All my ideas are stolen anyway,' claiming that he was told by his tutor Michael Craig-Martin, 'Don't borrow ideas, steal them' (possibly Craig-Martin had Picasso's famous adage in mind: 'Good artists copy, great artists steal'). 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Some were supported by the artists in question, such as the Los Angeles artist Lori Precious, who said she went into 'a state of shock' after seeing Hirst's butterfly works and noting their resemblance to her mandala works made of butterflies. (Hirst has never publicly acknowledged Precious's remarks, which were not made through legal representation, and told Blake that he got the idea from Victorian tea trays.) Some were Thomson's assertion, such as the similarity between Hirst's early medicine cabinet works and Joseph Cornell's 1943 sculpture Pharmacy. Hirst's press officer at the time described the article as 'poor journalism' and said they would be issuing a 'comprehensive rebuttal'. If this exists, I can't find it. John LeKay, once a good friend of Hirst's, has claimed the artist has repurposed a number of his ideas, including skulls covered in crystals, which LeKay first experimented with in 1993, and has intimated that Hirst's In the Name of the Father, 2005, which featured the corpse of a sheep splayed to resemble a crucifixion pose, was probably inspired by his own 1987 work This Is My Body, This Is My Blood, which does the same thing but without preserving it in formaldehyde. • 25 moments that made Tate Modern — seeds, spiders and sharks LeKay also claimed that Hirst got the ideas for his pickled animal works from a catalogue LeKay lent him, for the Carolina Biological Supply Company, which sold science education products (which is a perfectly reasonable and valid place to get ideas — they don't usually just come out of thin air). Hirst declined to comment on the claims. He did agree, in 2000, to pay an undisclosed sum, out of court, to two children's charities when Humbrol took umbrage at his large-scale bronze sculpture Hymn, describing it as a direct copy of the company's Young Scientist Anatomy Set, designed by Norman Emms (apparently Hirst's young son had one). Mostly, though, claims have gone unanswered. In 2017 Jason deCaires Taylor claimed there were 'striking similarities' between his underwater sculptural installations, which he has been making since 2006, and the works that made up Hirst's Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable, exhibited at that year's Venice Biennale. Hirst denied that he had breached copyright and a spokeswoman said he had been interested in 'coralised' objects since the 1990s. In 2022 he exhibited a suite of paintings of cherry blossom at the Fondation Cartier in Paris, which depicted dark branches against a pale blue sky, with petals made of dots. The English artist and writer Joe Machine told a newspaper that he thought when he saw them that he was looking at his own earlier paintings. (A stretch, to be honest. Stylistically they're not particularly similar and it's not as if artists haven't been painting cherry blossoms for centuries. To me, they just look like Hirst has rather savvily combined his dot motif with a tried-and-tested subject matter to appeal to the large east Asian market.) • Read more art reviews, guides and interviews The fact is you cannot copyright an idea. It's true that Thomas Downing was doing spot paintings in the Sixties. So did John Armeleder in the Eighties. Part of the fury around Hirst's alleged appropriation of ideas is that he's made so much more money out of them than anyone else — his success has created its own market, regardless of the quality of the work, which is variable to say the least. I doubt this latest, repeated accusation will make the slightest difference to Hirst's reputation. People know what they're getting with him, and Butt's Transmission, which the Whitechapel will show with the insect component remade for the first time since his degree show (Butt reportedly destroyed Fly-Piece after Hirst's work was shown) is likely to remain a frustrating footnote in art history. And as Dominic Johnson, curator of the exhibition, carefully remarks in the catalogue: 'It's always interesting to consider how and where artists get ideas from especially when working in shared spaces or contexts (as was the case for so many of the YBAs and their peers), as there is inevitably always going to be a degree of cross-pollination — conscious or unconscious.' Still, Picasso's pithy soundbite doesn't mean that stealing makes you a great artist. Mediocre artists steal too. And maybe the suggestion that A Thousand Years, in my opinion Hirst's finest work (he made it aged 25; he's 60 now and nothing he's done since has been as good, not even the shark), was heavily reliant on someone else's idea might, on darker nights, give Hirst a moment's pause.
