I Tried the TikTok Viral Foundation Stick Kourtney Kardashian’s Been Wearing

I Totally Get Why TikTok Is Obsessed With Basma Beauty’s Foundation Stick
I Tried the TikTok Viral Foundation Stick Kourtney Kardashian’s Been Wearing 

When you look at The Foundation Stick from Basma Beauty, you see what appears to be a shiny, magenta tube. For the brand’s founder, Basma Hameed, however, the premiere product of her beauty brand is much more than what meets the eye: it’s a compilation of some painful life experiences, as she tells Allure over Zoom. 

The real-life experiences that she refers to are the hours spent in and out of the hospital meeting with doctors and plastic surgeons to treat the third-degree facial burns she sustained from a kitchen accident at the age of two. “I understood [skin] discoloration, right? I dealt with it being so young. So I understood color correcting. I understood undertones,” Hameed explains. 

She credits all that time spent in the hospital, in addition to a treatment that she created to cover her facial scar at the age of 17, for helping her get all the colors and undertones just right for The Foundation Stick’s 40-shade range. The four-year-long development process also involved consultations with makeup artists and testing the foundation on clients at her clinic, Basma Hameed Clinic, where she offers the camouflage scar treatment that she created as a teen for individuals with “burns, birthmarks, surgical scars, scars from accidents, pretty much any type of skin discoloration.” Her clinic has two locations: one in Beverly Hills and the other in her hometown of Toronto, Canada. 

The Foundation Stick has also gained momentum as a viral beauty product on TikTok. Users on the clock app have applauded this stick for its creamy texture and beautiful finish. The stick’s claim to TikTok fame has also received some help from Kourtney Kardashian after several of the app’s users discovered that Kardashian’s makeup artist, Rokael Lizama, used the sticks on her face. Videos with the hashtag #basmabeauty have acquired over 748,000 views as of the publishing of this post — and it’s easy to see why.

Although it is a foundation stick, Basma tells me that she “[doesn’t] want it to be just used for one thing.” It can also be used to contour, highlight, and as a cream bronzer, depending on what shades you choose to use. I decided to put it to the test as a foundation. 

This was my first foray into the world of stick foundation. I always use liquid foundations with a makeup sponge, so I foreshadowed some bumps in the application process along the way. After three trial runs — yes, three — I found the best way to apply this foundation is with a dense makeup brush. To make sure I wasn’t walking around with any lines on my face, I heeded the sage advice of makeup artist Vincent Oquendo: “Buff, buff, buff foundation into the skin — quickly, like a whirlwind — with a brush,” he previously told Allure.