Martha Stewart, 84, Skips Matte Anything and Swears by a $14 Drugstore Glotion: ‘I Like to Glow’

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Martha Stewart wears the same $14 drugstore foundation to the gym and to the stable. She told InStyle as much in a recent profile of her morning and evening skincare and makeup routine, where the 84-year-old (who splits her time between her 153-acre Cantitoe Corners farm in Katonah, NY, and a Manhattan apartment she bought with her daughter Alexis a couple years back) talked about everything from her L’Oréal Glotion ($14, the stable one) to her morning vitamin C step (Mario Badescu) to her own clinical skincare brand (Elm Biosciences, launched with her longtime dermatologist).

“I like to glow. I don’t like matte finishes on anything. I like my furniture to be shiny, I like my face to be shiny.”

Her full routine consists of ten products: drugstore mixed with high-end, vitamin C, a peptide moisturizer, and a dewy finish from her base to her highlighter, which is the perfect choice for skincare and makeup past the age of 50. The best part? Three of her 10 picks are all cost-effective.

L’Oréal Paris True Match Lumi Glotion ($14)

Stewart’s drugstore foundation is L’Oréal’s True Match Lumi Glotion. “This is my foundation, what I wear to the gym and the stable.” (Only Martha Stewart has a foundation she wears to the stable.) Glotion is a tinted hydrator with built-in luminosity, closer to a serum than a foundation, and it sits on skin like a healthy-skin filter rather than a layer of color. L’Oréal launched the Lumi range in 2018, riding the dewy-makeup wave that came out of Korean skincare around the same time, and Glotion has been the breakout star ever since.

It isn’t a coverage product, though. If you have redness or pigment to handle, spot-conceal first and then layer Glotion on top. The dewy finish will not last you all day, so if you need staying power, try a super thin powder pass on your T-zone (not the whole face).

Mario Badescu Vitamin C Serum ($45)

For her morning vitamin C step, Stewart reaches for Mario Badescu, which has been mixing skincare in Queens since 1967 and is one of the rare independent skincare brands that has stayed family-owned through the indie-skincare wars of the 2010s (which makes it older than most of its TikTok mentions would suggest). The Vitamin C serum is one of the more reliable lower-priced C formulas you can find: roughly 7.5% L-ascorbic acid plus tocopheryl acetate (vitamin E) and ferulic acid, which is the stabilizing trio every C serum should have.

7.5% L-ascorbic is on the lower end of what’s clinically effective, so if you have a high tolerance and significant pigmentation, you may want to step up to a 15-20% formula like Maelove Glow Maker. The Mario Badescu formula can also run slightly tacky on application, which some of us love as a primer effect and others find annoying. Patch-test it on your skin first to see if you have any reaction to high-acid formulas.

Elm Biosciences A3O Elemental Serum ($135)

Stewart launched Elm after seven years of being Dr. Dhaval Bhanusali’s skincare patient, and the brand is a rare combo of celebrity skincare and actual clinical dermatology: 350+ dermatologists, scientists, and researchers are on the advisory board, and the product contains a patent-pending complex backed by published research.

The A3O Complex pairs acetyl zingerone (a stable antioxidant developed at Sytheon with real published research behind it), bakuchiol (a milder retinol alternative shown in a British Journal of Dermatology study to deliver comparable wrinkle and pigmentation improvements to retinol at 0.5% twice daily over 12 weeks, with less irritation), and a ferulic acid ester, plus hyaluronic acid, blue tansy, and squalane for hydration and barrier support. The combination targets oxidative damage, which is responsible for a lot of what shows up on aging skin: dullness, flatness, and the grey cast no foundation actually fixes.

Reviews so far have been strong, with most users reporting visible improvements in clarity, tone, and texture within two to four weeks and a sturdier barrier underneath. At $135, A3O sits at the lower end of clinical “prestige” skincare (SkinCeuticals C E Ferulic, the long-standing benchmark for antioxidant serums, runs $182 by comparison), which makes Elm the value pick at this tier. For anyone who wants the antioxidant trio at a cheaper price point, Maelove Glow Maker ($32) and Timeless 20% Vitamin C E Ferulic ($30) have similar formulas. (You can thank the expired SkinCeuticals patent for that!)

Where we’d push the routine further

Stewart rightfully skips setting powder, contour, and matte lipstick, and she likely got the advice from celebrity makeup artists she’s worked with over the years who consistently give the same advice.

She also doesn’t appear to be using prescription tretinoin in this published routine, which is the ingredient with the strongest research behind it for skin over 50. Bakuchiol is doing the gentler retinoid-adjacent work in her serum, and for anyone with low retinoid tolerance, that’s a decent substitute. For anyone whose skin can take the real thing, tretinoin still outperforms it when it comes to collagen production.