An Ode To Dream Matte Mousse, A Staple Of Every 2000s Girl’s Makeup Bag

Any Irish woman worth her salt will fondly remember Maybelline’s Dream Matte Mousse, the foundation of choice for girls coming of age in the 2000s.

While we’ve moved on, Dream Matte Mousse is still going strong, all these years later (and it’s €11.99 in Boots if you want to try it out again).

Let’s look back on the time when it first came into our lives.

It was somehow simultaneously very light and very heavy

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bc92JBtFGIv/

The texture was a revelation at the time – it was smooth and silky, but still gave you the coverage you believed your 13-year-old skin needed, which was ‘as much as is humanly possible’. And not a pore on your little face! But you didn’t know about pores then, not like you do now.

Your shade of choice was called something like ‘Sand’ or ‘Sun Beige’

https://twitter.com/Kath_rynnn/status/976928715644047360

The arrogance of us pale Irish girls heading in to the chemist, picking up a foundation in the shade ‘Caramel’, and thinking “Mmm, yeah. That’s me. Caramel.”

You just slapped it on with your hands

All of us when we discovered maybelline dream matte mousse age 13 pic.twitter.com/e3GQgKUXCg

— Ash 🦇 (@midge3027) February 21, 2018

Buffing brush? Beauty blender? Never heard of them. You rubbed it into your eyebrows and across your lips, leaving you with a vast expanse of beige for a face, floating ominously over your lily-white neck. What an image!

And that was just your school look

https://www.instagram.com/p/BfqVy5FgVia/

You stepped it up for teen discos, where the foundation would be supplemented by two perfect circles of pink blush on your cheeks, a smear of sparkly white or blue eyeshadow, and a slick of Juicy Tubes (or a pharmacy-brand Juicy Tubes rip off) on your mouth.

Buying your first tub of Dream Matte Mousse coincided with various other rites of passage in your teenage life

Like rolling up your school skirt, or discovering GHDs, or getting an ill-advised side fringe. It was the gateway drug to all of these things.

And try as you might, you can’t help but look back fondly on those days

https://www.instagram.com/p/BZeuQpgjLqx/

It was all so simple back then. All you were concerned about was coating yourself with beige so you could stand within eyeshot of some boys.

We’re super tempted to buy it again, just to see

Could Dream Matte Mousse be The One if we simply treated it right – used a lighter hand, picked a better shade? We have to know. Watch this space…

• 2000s beauty
• Makeup
• Maybelline