Fenty Beauty Invisimatte Instant Setting + Blotting Powder and Charlotte Tilbury Airbrush Flawless Finish Setting Powder have near-perfect records: 45 of 46 and 35 of 36 reviewers who mentioned cakiness said they look smooth. Huda Beauty Easy Bake Loose Setting Powder is the strongest loose powder at 27 of 30.
Updated . How we count
Share of reviewers who stated an outcome for cakiness. Ranked by the lower bound of a 90% confidence interval, so a product needs both a good share and enough reports to rank high.
Praise and complaints are the points buyers repeat most, shown as a share of each product's counted store reviews.
Fenty Beauty
Best for controlling shine
63% say it controls oil and shine, the most of any powder here. Ranked on Ulta reviews.
Charlotte Tilbury
Best for blurring pores
64% say it blurs pores and texture. The most common complaint is the price (6%).
Huda Beauty
Best for baking
67% say it blurs and 53% that it keeps makeup in place.
e.l.f.
Best for a drugstore budget
25% call it good value. On e.l.f.'s own site, 9 of 10 say it isn't cakey, which we show but don't count.
No repeated complaints yet.
Laura Mercier
Store split: 17 of 19 at Sephora, 15 of 24 at Ulta. 16% find it drying.
KVD Beauty
8% mention flashback and 5% say shine comes back fast.
bareMinerals
The brand-site gap in one product: 35 of 35 reviewers on bareMinerals' own site say it isn't cakey, against 27 of 38 at Sephora.
The 7 products ranked here carry 102,112 reviews at Ulta and Sephora. We searched them for cakiness and read the newest matching reviews, up to 40 per product and store, posted between May 2015 and Sep 2026.
A review counts only when the reviewer used the product themselves. We drop reviews written in exchange for a free product or a sweepstakes entry (133 on this page), and products that are no longer sold.
Ulta also shows reviews first posted on brands' own websites. They run much more positive than store reviews of the same products (across 19 products with both, 76% of brand-site reviewers said the product solved the problem, against 55% of Ulta shoppers), so we show them on product cards but never count them.
Because we searched for the problem, people who had it are overrepresented. Compare products with each other rather than reading a share as your own odds.
An AI model labels each review against a fixed list of points, and we spot-check the labels before publishing. We publish counts and link to the product pages, never the reviews themselves.
In these reviews, Fenty Beauty Invisimatte Instant Setting + Blotting Powder (45 of 46) and Charlotte Tilbury Airbrush Flawless Finish Setting Powder (35 of 36). Among loose powders, Huda Beauty Easy Bake Loose Setting Powder leads at 27 of 30.
For some. 32 of 43 reviewers who brought up cakiness said it looks smooth, a lower share than the four powders ranked above it.
They run far more positive. On Laura Mercier's site, 25 of 25 reviewers said the Ultra-Blur powder isn't cakey, against 9 of 14 at Ulta. We show brand-site numbers on product cards but rank on store reviews only.
HiveTried earns a commission when you buy through "Check price on Amazon" buttons. It never changes the ranking: the order comes from buyer reports only.