Under-eye circles. The bane of my existence. Even the famed YSL Touche Eclat cannot hide these babies; they stubbornly resist all my efforts to erase them and no matter how hard I try they always triumph over the layers of eye-brightening cream, concealer and powder. As you can imagine, my futile attempts to conceal these monstrosities have proven to be quite expensive, and when my Touche Eclat gave up, after a long and hard battle against the 'bags', I had to find a cheaper alternative. My friend Stephie swears by the No7 concealer but even with a voucher that's still over £8, and for a poverty-stricken student like myself that's a lot of money to spend on a concealer (Over £13 full-price! I reasoned that I could get Touch Eclat in duty-free for just a little bit more than that!). So I turned to Boots' cheaper alternative: the 17 range.

To match their Hide & Chic foundation they also brought out the matching concealer, and as it was cheaper than brands such as Bourjois I thought I'd give it a go. They also do the Hide Away corrector cream for a pound less but I decide 'eye brightening' is what I needed to go for and so I bought this one instead.

It's not bad...I've taken a rather scary comparison photo (please excuse foundation-less face: I thought it'd showcase the product better if it was used on its own!) and I think it's rather obvious which eye-bag I've tried to conceal:

As you can see it does lighten the eye area, but doesn't make the shadow disappear completely (but then, to be fair, neither did YSL!). I really think that this is the best result I can expect with a product costing under ten pounds. It does a pretty good job, but I don't think I'll repurchase solely because there are so many different similar products out there that I haven't tried yet, and who knows, maybe one of those will be my miracle product? Trying hard to be optimistic here!