Concealer is a slightly different value proposition from foundation. With foundation, the drugstore formulas are often as good as the expensive ones and our overall pick is a drugstore product. With concealer, the cheap formulas are frequently excellent and the shade range is where the money genuinely goes — and shade matters more for concealer than for anything else in a makeup bag.
The reason is simple. A mismatched foundation shows at the jawline, which is a boundary you can soften. A mismatched concealer sits in a small bright patch in the middle of your face, surrounded by your actual skin tone, with no way to blend it into anything. On mature skin it reads as a pale gray spot and it draws the eye more than whatever you were covering.
Short ranges collapse at both ends. At the deep end they get darker without changing undertone, so most people are matched to the nearest wrong hue. At the fair end they tend to go pink, which on sallow mature skin reads as a mismatched patch even when the depth is right. A twelve-shade concealer range cannot serve mature skin across depths and undertones, and that is what you are buying when you pay more.
What the drugstore does genuinely well is texture and hydration, which are cheap to formulate and are most of what makes a concealer behave on thin skin. Glycerin, squalane and a soft cream base cost almost nothing, and e.l.f.'s hydrating concealer is a better-behaved product on a creasing under-eye than several concealers at five times the price that were formulated for longwear.
The other drugstore advantage is replacement cost, which nobody mentions. Concealer thickens in the tube over time, and thickened product creases far more readily. At drugstore price you can replace it every six months without thinking about it, which quietly solves a problem people spend money trying to formulate around.
