I have never known a category soar as suddenly as setting spray. It existed for aeons, with the best of them (Urban Decay’s All Nighter, £29.50, which still has second-to-none longevity) rarely threatened by anything new. But countless sprays have launched in the past year, all of them promising to significantly increase the lifespan of makeup.
There’s an argument that “fixing sprays” and “setting sprays” have different purposes (locking down makeup versus providing a more unified, less powdery finish, respectively), but I dismiss it because it’s based on the generous assumption that the marketeers who name products according to popular Google search terms give a hoot for semantic nuance. Here, I mean sprays that do all of the above, drastically reducing makeup fade and wear, even during dancing, hot flushing or perspiring.
