An Ode To Maybelline Dream Mousse, A Foundation Only ’00s Girlies Will Understand

If there’s one makeup product that can evoke full-blown nostalgia in a woman aged in their late-20s to mid-30s, it’s the Maybelline Dream Matte Mousse Foundation.

The small tub of spongey foundation had every ’00s girlie in an absolute chokehold, particularly around the mid-late ’00s. Across school grounds, every girl would sit, cross-legged in (probably) checkered uniforms, their faces swiped with Maybelline Matte a shade darker than their natural skin colour.

Covering hormonal acne, giving off a nice orange glow, and being spread onto the face luxuriously with fingers (definitely not sponges) — it was the product of choice.

Here’s a list of things you’d only understand if you were a Maybelline Matte fangirl in the ’00s.

1. Regardless of how it looked, or whether it was the right choice for your skin, you were still converted to it because everyone else in your year group was wearing it.
2. The ‘Porcelain Ivory’ tub was a special shade of porcelain orange.
3. No matter how hard you tried, you could never quite perfect not having that defined line around your jaw.
4. On a school day, it was pretty much your whole routine — no primer, no powder, no setting spray. Just whack some dream matte mousse on and go about your day thinking you looked hot.
5. You’d always have nearly-empty tubs laying around your bathroom, never quite discarded fully until you bought a new one.
6. And you’d find a half-empty tub a few months later, looking all dried up and crusty.
7. As much as you thought the foundation was working wonders for you, by lunch time it was probably clumped unevenly on your face.
8. Or at the very least, melting off from your oily pubescent skin.
9. For weekend parties, you’d whack a few layers of it on, thinking you looked hot.
10. You were never quite sure if the mousse was actually adding more havoc to your breakout prone skin.
11. The foundation always felt somewhere in between a bit too greasy vs. a bit too powdery when applying.
12. You still wonder to this day if the foundation was even that bad, or if it was just because we all had no idea what we were doing when it came to setting our makeup as teens.
13. So it gets tempting to try and hunt down the matte foundation and try again, just for old times’ sake.
14. Until those orange-flashbacks start haunting your mind.
15. And we all realise: it’s best left as a nostalgic moment in time.

Ahhh, sweet nostalgia. BRB, I’m going to go crack open a Red Bear, tease my hair up, listen to some Fall Out Boy, and smother my face in some Maybelline.