Is Patrick Ta Blush Worth It? A $40 Reality Check

Worth it, on one condition: you have to use both sides. Patrick Ta's Major Headlines Double-Take Blush Duo costs $40.00 for a compact holding 6 g of creme and 4 g of pressed powder, listed as 0.21 oz and 0.14 oz (patrickta.com, checked August 2026). The powder alone lasted about nine hours in Temptalia's wear test, and the duo earned an A- there. If you only ever reach for cream blush, half the pan sits unused, and a $10.99 Milani does that half's job.

What you're actually buying

One compact, two formulas, meant to be layered in a set order. The brand's instruction is to wear the sides separately or put the creme over the powder. The powder carries the pigment and the wear; the creme adds a dewy top layer that reads like skin, at the cost of about half an hour to an hour of longevity in Temptalia's testing. The brand site lists exactly 21 shades, from Not Too Much (soft rosey taupe) to She Left Me On Red (warm vivid red). The two that dominate search interest are She's That Girl (soft pink) and Do We Know Her? (neutral peach). It sells at patrickta.com, Sephora and Kohl's.

The price keeps moving

Temptalia's review listed the duo at $34. Later independent coverage priced it at $38. The brand site now charges $40, which works out to about $114 per ounce across the 10 g of product. A $25 mini exists in six shades, but the brand doesn't publish its net weights, so nobody can do the per-ounce math on it. It is still the cheaper way to test a shade before committing to the full size.

What's genuinely good

Wear time is the honest selling point. In Temptalia's testing the powder went about nine hours on its own and the creme about six; layered together, total wear dropped by 30 minutes to an hour, still a full workday. Powder pigmentation is high enough that a light hand matters. Both formulas list tocopheryl acetate (vitamin E), and talc appears nowhere in the ingredient lists published on the brand site; the powder is built on synthetic fluorphlogopite and mica instead. On patrickta.com the mini duo carries a 4.9 average across 2,804 reviews (checked August 2026). That number is brand-hosted, so weigh it accordingly, but it points the same direction as the A- from independent testing.

What isn't

The creme side is semi-sheer. It builds, but if you want one-swipe cream color, this is not that product, and it is the side with the bigger pan: 6 g of creme against 4 g of powder, so the sheerer formula is the one you run out of first. The powder kicks up more excess in the pan than it should, a flaw Temptalia flagged even though it didn't hurt application on skin. Fragrance is the other catch. Most shades list Fragrance (Parfum) alongside farnesol and linalool in the main ingredient list, and a handful carry those two only under May Contain, so check the shade you want if scent components bother your skin. The 18% price climb since launch is real money on something you will repurchase.

Buy it, or don't

Buy it if you wear blush daily, need it alive at 6 p.m., and will actually run the two-step. The powder-then-creme layering is what separates it from a single cream blush, and it is the reason the duo holds a spot on our best blush list. The buildable, dewy finish also flatters dry or mature skin that powder blush alone turns dusty.

Skip it if you are a cream-blush-only person, if fragrance components are a dealbreaker, or if you count cost per ounce, because $114 an ounce is steep even by Sephora standards.

The $11 route

Milani Cheek Kiss Cream Blush costs $10.99 at Target (checked August 2026), roughly a quarter of the Patrick Ta price. Target lists it at 0.21 fl oz, a volume measure, against Patrick Ta's 6 g of creme by weight, so the two pans look close on paper without being a like-for-like comparison. The rest of it is simpler: the Milani is cream only, sheerer and dewier, and it fades sooner because no powder base is holding it down. The formulas are not the same. Add any drugstore powder blush and you can rebuild the two-step for around $21. What you can't rebuild is the shade-matched pairing in one compact, and that pairing, more than either formula on its own, is what the extra $19 buys.