blush

Review: Bare Minerals Insider’s Kit (with Cheek Tint and Color-Shift Eyeshadow)

By Voxy  |  2012/02/12 13:51 Posted in blush, eyeshadow, lip gloss, Product Reviews  |  Comments (0)

A few months ago, a friend and I sat down at ULTA and had little mini-makeovers, just for fun. This particular friend has a very busy telecommuting job and two small children, so she has had neither the time nor the external motivation to keep up her makeup routine, and I think she misses being girly. Anyhoo, she was fine with getting a little eye makeup done, and a little lip gloss, but when the brave ULTA sales associate advanced on her with a fan brush loaded with a startlingly pink neon blush (Smashbox, I think), she suddenly made a valiant effort to climb out of her skin in order to get away from the brush. Her eyes were as big as saucers! Undaunted, the SA flicked the fan brush over the apples of her cheeks and deposited a sheer flush of color that looked simply AH-MAZE-ING. (Even my friend agreed, after she had calmed down and had a martini to get over the shock.) Although at the time I didn’t end up buying that blush, I kept thinking about how good it looked — so when I saw this kit at Sephora with a super-bright pink cheek tint and a new “color-shift” eyeshadow, I grabbed onto it with my grimy little paws and would not let it go.

Sephora has a couple of Bare Minerals kits on offer right now, two of which contain this mysterious “color-shift eyeshadow.” By the way, the Bare Escentuals store that is about 50 yards away from the Sephora in one of my local malls had never heard of the stuff, which is slightly worrisome. As of right now there are two colors available, and each one is only available with purchase of a kit (in other words, you can’t buy just the eyeshadow, more’s the pity). Fortunately this particular kit had some other stuff I was drawn to, so it worked out.

In this particular Insider’s Kit, you get the following: Cheek Tint (Bare Minerals’ first cheek stain, as they call it) in shade Flirt, a color-shift shadow in Panache (a bright peach, which, upon buffing, acquires a lavender duotone), liner shadow in Twilight Violet (a sort of purple-gray with sparkles), Natural Lipgloss in Cherry Bomb, and a dual-ended brush.

The cheek tint is frighteningly bright in the container. And when I say “frightening,” I mean “sleep with the lights on”, “put a baseball bat under your bed”, “have your teddy bear on speed dial” frightening. Please DO NOT drop this on your carpet, as it will stain. Unless, that is, you already have a hot pink neon carpet, in which case I want to come to your house and see it. I admit that I have not tried applying the cheek tint with the provided brush. This is because I am terrified that I will go from zero to Krazy Klown Face in less time than it takes to say “Krazy Klown Face,” which isn’t really very much time at all. Instead, I’ve been using a fan brush, and this has worked so far. Like the blush the ULTA SA put on my friend, it delivers a sheer pop of bright color. Because it is sheer, it’s wearable for pretty much everyone. If I can pull it off, anyone who has darker skin than me (which is to say, almost everyone) can probably also do so.

The color-shift eyeshadow is the surprise winner here. In general I’m a skeptic about these kinds of things, but Oh My Goodness Gracious Me It Looks Fantastic. There are two things I really like about it: 1. the peach shade by itself is a lovely eye brightener, and 2. when you blend it out into purple, the transition is very nice (it passes through a pinky stage) and the two colors both look good together and are surprisingly easily incorporated into an overall look. Just for grins, I tried it wet to see what would happen, and the peach color turned into a neon sort of pink. In general I think dry application is better than wet here. The swatches below don’t do it justice; I found it hard to capture the purple tones on film. (Well, digital film, but whatev.) I’m surprised by how nice it is on my eyes. There is another shade available in another kit, which goes on a kind of dirty greenish-gold and buffs out to a fairly intense sky blue.

The lipgloss is … meh. It doesn’t do anything for me, but it won’t hurt you. I wouldn’t have bought it on its own. The color in the tube is fantastic, but on lips it doesn’t have much of an effect. Maybe this is just my lips.

The shadow liner is best worked with wet rather than dry. If you use it dry, there is a lot of fallout. Wet, it’s a nice shade of gray with hints of purple, and the glitter stays where it’s supposed to stay. And unlike the color-shift eyeshadow, when you wet this one it stays the same color it was originally. I’m not a huge fan of it, but I don’t hate it either, and I’m sure I’ll use it from time to time.

The brush is nice, but as I said earlier I haven’t tried to use it with the cheek tint. YMMV.

So in the kit, the winners are the cheek tint, the color-shift eyeshadow, and the brush. The gloss and liner shadow are OK but I wouldn’t have bought them separately.

Swatches!

Closeup of the color-shift eyeshadow in Panache.

 

This is how Panache goes on…

 

… and this is what happens when you buff it. It was incredibly hard to capture the lavender tone on my camera; this is kind of a fail.

 

Cheek Tint in Flirt.

 

Swatch of cheek tint in Flirt, with a sprinkle of powder on the left and a blended-out bit on the right.

 

Liner shadow closeup

 

Swatch of liner shadow (left) and lipgloss (right).

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Bare Escentuals BareMinerals Insider Introducing Cheek Tint: $36 at Sephora

Provenance: Purchased.

Price/Value Ratio (high-end: poor/fair/good/excellent): Good. Would have preferred to purchase products separately.

Purchase again? N/A, but I’d buy other kits if they had what I wanted.

(Have you used this product? Love it? Hate it? Want it? Give a holler in the comments!)

Review: Chanel Blush Horizons Blush Éclat Douceur

By Voxy  |  2012/01/23 21:20 Posted in blush, Makeup, Product Reviews  |  Comments (0)

I am so glad to see the return of blush for spring. Not that it ever totally disappeared, but the seasonal focus is so often on lips or eyes that poor blush gets the bum’s rush.

It is Land of Blush in the Voxpartment. There are blushes everywhere. Because you never know when you might be, say, watching TV, and suddenly need to put on some blush. Also, they are pretty and I like to have them around. Anyway, I have a couple of gems from the spring collections. (Did you hear that? SPRING COLLECTIONS! YAYAYAYAY!!!!)

 

 

Watch out for that last one. It’s a doozy. I suggest wearing earplugs.

In the grab-it-while-you-still-can department, Chanel’s Blush Horizon compact for Spring 2012 is flying off shelves. Not by itself, obvs. This is the compact for those of us who were too stupid to rush out and buy Guerlain Blush G Serie Noir blush last year. [whacks self on head]

Like the Guerlain product, Chanel’s compact features several different shades of blush arranged in horizontal stripes. While technically I suppose you could try to get a brush in them singly, let’s be realistic. You’re going to mash your brush up in there and mix all the colors together. Right? Because who has time for being soooo finicky with blush?

Besides me, I mean. What? No other hands up? Barbarians.

One of the very first luxe products I ever owned was a Chanel blush, which I now think was probably the wrong shade for me, but which filled me with frissons of indulgent delight whenever I used it. I want to be more in love with the aesthetics of the Blush Horizon compact than I am, but sadly, I’m not. It’s slightly too “Ladies Who Lunch” for me. However — the product inside is one of the best powder blushes I’ve used in a long time. I love cream and liquid blushes so much that a powder blush has basically got to feed Africa, calculate the square root of 2139, and name all fifty state capitals in alphabetical order before it can tempt me. I went several rounds with this blush in the store, visiting it over the course of a couple weeks and testing it. With a lot of effort, I managed to convince myself it wasn’t worth buying. “Too sparkly,” I said, and “remember you don’t like powder blushes anymore,” I said, and “stupid Guerlain Blush G, being so awesome.” Well, only that last one is really true.

It’s not too sparkly, which is nice. It’s a lovely shade of pink, more pigmented than I thought it would be from the swatch, but lighter in pigmentation than most Chanel blushes, which is a good thing. Still, the first time I used it, I almost ended up with Crazy Clown Cheeks. There is a bit of shimmer, but it’s very subtle — and I am paranoid about shimmer on cheeks, so if even I think it’s OK, you are probably good to go. It wore remarkably well all day, much better than some of my other powder blushes.

Color-wise, it is definitely cool (I’m speaking of the color you get when you mix all the stripes together), but not untenable for warm-toned beauties. There is a bit of melon in the bottom stripes, so if you want a slightly peachier tint you can finagle the brush in there accordingly.

If you want it, get it now. Seriously, FLYING off shelves.

Close-up and swatch!

I had to pile it on fairly thickly for the swatch so that it would really show up.

 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Chanel Blush Horizon de Chanel Blush Éclat Douceur: $58

Provenance: Purchased.

Price/Value Ratio (high-end: poor/fair/good/excellent): Poor. Come on, I love Chanel, but $58 for a blush is outrageous.

Purchase again? Hopefully I will never hit pan.

(Have you used this product? Love it? Hate it? Want it? Give a holler in the comments!)

 

Review: YSL Creme de Blush in Velvety Peach

By Voxy  |  2011/05/25 07:00 Posted in blush, Makeup, Product Reviews  |  Comments (1)

In a recent conversation, Mama Voxy said the following:

“I think I’m going to use up all the blushes I have before I buy more.”

Said I, “That’s a good intention. I never stick to it myself. How many do you have?”

Mama Voxy: “Two.”

…

No, I am not telling you how many are in my stash, but it is substantially more than two. Because, of course, one needs to have EVERY SINGLE AVAILABLE SHADE of pink, peach, red, orange, terracotta, raspberry, bronze, fuschia, rose, poppy, bubblegum, crimson, apricot, watermelon, cerise, and … well, you get the idea. Not only does one (by which, of course, I mean “me”) need to own all of these colors, one (me) should also preferably have each shade in each available formulation: powder, cream, liquid, cream-to-powder, gel, and stain.

(This is why I have a cosmetics blog.)

There are lots of blushes that I really like. As we saw a few days ago, with the “Fox in a Box” debacle, there are some I think fail completely. There are a lot more that kinda-sorta work well or that fit very specific color needs in my blush wardrobe (MAC Stereo Rose, for instance, which is a shade of poppy that only works with certain color combinations, but when it does, boy is it purty).

This spring I have been fortunate enough to happen upon several fabulous blushes that I adore, and one of which I think I can safely elevate to Holy Grail status. That one is Yves St. Laurent Creme de Blush in Velvet Peach.

Lots of blushes are advertised as “cream-to-powder,” but it seems that few of them actually are. Most of them stay creamy. Which is fine; I love cream blushes. This is one of the best cream-to-powder blushes I’ve used: it is easy to apply with a brush but actually does become a soft blendable powder. Also, the color is fantastic. As a pink-skinned lass, I find peachy blushes can sometimes be difficult (they can look as if I’d slapped a piece of salmon on my skin), but this is B.E.A.U.T.I.F.U.L.

You could probably apply this with your fingers, because it is so easily blended it would be pretty hard to screw up. I have to admit that I apply all of my non-powder blushes with a brush — a paintbrush. More precisely, a 3/4″ Loew-Cornell 270 Maxine’s Mop brush that I bought at Michael’s for some outrageously cheap price. Michael’s’ website (? I don’t know how to properly possessify that — the website belonging to Michael’s) is not very user-friendly in terms of providing information on individual brushes, so here is a link and a picture from Amazon:

So yes, this is what I use almost exclusively for cream, liquid, and cream-to-powder application. On the YSL it works a treat, just like it does on most of my other stuff.

So, are there any flies in this ambrosial peach ointment? Tragically, yes. First: DEAR COSMETICS MANUFACTURERS, PLEASE STOP PUTTING TINY POTS OF PRODUCT INTO BIG ENORMOUS WASTEFUL SQUARE CLEAR PLASTIC CONTAINERS THANK YOU. Seriously, I hate this. Are you trying to camouflage how small the pot of product is? Some of your customers may be dumb enough to fall for that, but not this one. Second, and not unrelated: $38, YSL? Really? For a tiny pot? Well, I can see why you would want to make people think the container’s bigger than it is. This is particularly irksome as this is actually a blush I could see myself finishing. Have you ever heard me say that? I don’t think so. I did, in fact, finish a blush once. I think it was back in my high school days, when I, like Mama Voxy, owned a grand total of two blushes.

None of that takes away from the fabulous quality of the product, though. It looks terrifyingly orange in the pot (and the other five shades look pretty frightening as well), but it goes on a lovely soft peach that is pretty near impossible to screw up. I will probably pick up at least one other shade before all is said and done.

Swatch!

So pretty!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

YSL Creme de Blush in Velvety Peach: $38

Provenance: Purchased

Price/Value Ratio (high-end: poor/fair/good/excellent): Fair. Come on, $38 is a lot, even though the product is amazing.

Purchase again? Yes, dangit, in spite of the price.

(Have you used this product? Love it? Hate it? Want it? Give a holler in the comments!)

Review: Hard Candy “Fox in a Box” Blusher Quad in Spicy & Sweet

By Voxy  |  2011/05/23 09:11 Posted in blush, Product Reviews  |  Comments (3)

 

Well, duh, right? I obviously can’t let this one pass by without a signature Voxy review. So here it is, with my usual apologies to Theodore Geisel:

Fox, Vox,
Fox in Box.
Will this Fox Box
Rock my socks?

Fox in a Box has four blush blocks.
The colors won’t give any shocks:
Coral, bronze, and pink like phlox;
The coral looks a lot like lox.

“Benefit dupe?” says Foxy Voxy,
“Guess Hard Candy’s got some moxie.”
Want this Coralista proxy?
(Warning: you will need epoxy.)

Will it match your summer frocks?
Can you wear it on spacewalks?
Will it look good with Birkenstocks?
What verdict from the jury box?

 

 

More powdery than classroom chalks,
This blush won’t last five city blocks
Unless you’re stubborn as an ox
And wear so much your boyfriend gawks.

Do not wear it tending flocks,
Do not wear it climbing rocks.
Do not wear it darning socks,
Do not wear it to job talks!

I know this is unorthodox —
A warning not to buy, from Vox?
Though its design is cute and boxy,
You should skip it, saith Voxy.

So, uh, yeah. I say give it a miss. You can see in the swatches how powdery and chalky it is. I had to work pretty hard to even get the colors to show up that well. They also include a brush, as you can see in the photo above, but it’s horrendous. It does have pink bristles, which is almost a mitigating factor, but it’s so bad that I can’t justify giving them partial credit for it.

There are two other variations on the blusher quad: “Hot Flash” (redder) and “Smooth Talker” (peachy-bronze). There are also two bronzer duos from the same family: “Truth or Dare” (pink & bronze) and “Skinny Dipping” (orange and terracotta).

(In case it wasn’t clear, the numbers on the third picture were giving the order of swatches from left to right on my hand.)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Hard Candy “Fox in a Box” Blusher Quad: $6 at WalMart (exclusive retailer)

Provenance: Purchased.

Price/Value Ratio (drugstore: poor/fair/good/excellent): Excellent, but don’t buy it.

Purchase again? No way.

(Have you used this product? Love it? Hate it? Want it? Let us know in the comments!)

Review: Korres Zea Mays Powder Blushes in Peach and Pink

By Voxy  |  2011/02/24 11:15 Posted in blush, Makeup, Product Reviews  |  Comments (1)

Continuing on today with minimalistic product names, I’m reviewing two powder blushes by Greek brand Korres, in the simply-named but accurate Peach and Pink.

These blushes were my first purchase from Korres’ cosmetics line, not counting the lip butters (which I still love). I had been unimpressed with some of the skincare products, so I wasn’t expecting much of the cosmetics going into it. But I bought Peach, and it was Teh Awesome, so I had to get Pink as well (which is what’s pictured at the top of the post).

These blushes are generously sized, well-pigmented, and smooth to apply. They also have a mirror in the compact, which is nice. They do not have a brush in the compact, which is even nicer, as it makes the compact more … er, compact … and there is no space wasted on a silly flat little brush. I am NW20 in MAC and can wear either of them with my cool-toned skin. I think that cool-toned people often have a hard time finding flattering peach blushes, but this one works well. It’s easy to build up the color intensity — perhaps too easy — so you will want to start with a light hand. The Pink shade applies more coolly than it seems like it will based on the color in the pan and might not look as good on warm/olive-toned skin. I’d swatch before purchasing on that one, but both cool and warm skin tones can confidently order Peach. Both of them, but Peach especially, have shimmer in the pan but this is virtually unnoticeable on the skin unless you go overboard. Peach is often described as NARS Orgasm for people who can’t wear NARS Orgasm (like me), and I think that’s probably not too far off. It’s a similar shade but the shimmer is toned way down.

The lasting power is reasonable for a powder blush. You all know that since I discovered cream and gel blushes, my expectations for wearlength of any blush product have skyrocketed, which is probably unfair to powder blushes as all of them tend to fade much sooner on me than cream blushes. Meh. Setting with HD powder helps.

The packaging on these is a little too utilitarian for my liking. They’re square and kind of clunky, and the typesetting/type layout is all very simple and un-glam. You know me, I like my frills and ruffles and rhinestones, so I’d have liked it to be a little more luxurious in terms of presentation, but the product itself is very nice. (I suppose I could always Bedazzle the outside of the compact if I really wanted to… KIDDING.) The use of the “Zea Mays” term is inconsistent: some products contain it in the product name, some don’t. Zea mays is corn, or, more specifically for this product formulation, corn starch. So if you are allergic to corn starch, you might want to give these a pass.

Photos and swatch!

Korres Blush in Pink

Korres blush in Peach. Why is it in a dark brown compact when the Pink is in a white one? Dunno.

Left: Peach. Right: Pink. Pardon the weird shine in the photo.

 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Korres Zea Mays Blush: $24. Sephora also carries it for the same price but they only have four out of the eight shades.

Provenance: Purchased.

Price/Value Ratio (high-end: poor/fair/good/excellent): Good. There’s a lot of product. At 0.21 oz, you get almost twice as much as Bobbi Brown and Smashbox blushes (which are 0.13 oz each) and almost three times as much as a MUFE powder blush (0.08 oz), for comparable prices.

Purchase again? Yes, but I suspect I already have the two shades that suit my fair skin best.

(Have you used this product? Love it? Hate it? Want it? Give a holler in the comments!)

Review: Eve Pearl HD Foundation Cream Blush in Ruby

By Voxy  |  2011/01/05 07:00 Posted in blush, Makeup, Product Reviews  |  Comments (1)

Meet my new favorite cream blush.

No, srsly. The category of “Voxy’s favorite cream blushes” is well-populated and highly competitive. Stila CCs, Tarte cheek stains, Illamasqua and Becca cream blushes, Redpoint whipped blushes, and even the humble Almay Smart Shade blushes are constantly duking it out for alpha dog status. So for something to at least temporarily be King of the Hill, it’s got to be pretty damn extraordinary — which this product is.

I picked up a few Eve Pearl products during their Black Friday sale. Eve Pearl is a makeup artist who prettifies a lot of famous faces, and is possibly most well-known for being the lead makeup artist for the TODAY show. Eve herself looks just a tiny bit scary, but her work is beautiful: there are so many days that I’ve tuned in to the TODAY show and thought, “wow, Ann Curry and Meredith Vieira look FABULOUS.” Unfortunately, many of her products are painfully pricey, so I definitely wanted to wait for a sale to pick up a couple of items.

Eve Pearl’s cream blushes come in three shades: Rosy (recommended for fair to light skintones), Ruby (recommended for medium to tan skin tones), and Toffee (recommended for dark to deep skintones). I decided to buck the trend and go for Ruby, even though my skin would definitely be best characterized as “fair to light.” So sue me.

Here is what I love about this product:

1. Two taps of the brush are enough to get product sufficient for the whole cheek. It is insanely pigmented, but the pigment is not too bright.
2. The color blends out gorgeously and smoothly and is a completely natural-looking flush that can blend with either cool-toned or warm-toned makeup. It leans cool when I wear it with cool shadows and lippies, and warm when I pair it with bronzes and golds.
3. It looks five hundred percent natural, even though I committed the cardinal sin of using a blush not specifically targeted to my skin tone.
4. It wears beautifully and lasts all day.
5. It is creamy and blendable and not at all sticky, tacky, gloppy, patchy, or any of the other things people don’t like about cream blush.

Here is what I don’t love about this product:

<crickets>

Seriously, I cannot recommend this product highly enough. The only problem with it is that you don’t get so much for the money: it’s $22 for 3.5 g. However, there are other products both better and worse than this: Stila CCs are $25 for 4.25 g, but Becca creme blushes are $30 for 3 g.

The next time she has a sale, I’ll definitely be picking up the “Rosy” shade; the “Toffee” looks quite a bit too dark for me but would be gorgeous on darker-skinned women.

Swatch!

L: Heavily applied; R: blended out

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Eve Pearl HD Foundation Cream Blush in Ruby: $22 for 3.25 g.

Provenance: Purchased.

Price/Value Ratio (high-end: poor/fair/good/excellent): Fair.

Purchase again? Yes. I’ll definitely be getting the “Rosy” shade as well.

(Have you used this product? Love it? Hate it? Want it? Give a holler in the comments!)

Review: Illamasqua Powder Blush in Unrequited, Tremble

By Voxy  |  2010/11/21 23:19 Posted in blush, Makeup, Product Reviews  |  Comments (0)

Hi everyone. Remember me? I used to write about makeup, before a combination of the fall semester and a nasty cold walloped me and kept me pinned to the floor for several weeks.

In the interests of getting back on the horse, behold! Illamasqua powder blushers in Tremble and Unrequited.

How many pink blushes does one person really need, you might ask. It’s not so much a matter of need as it is a matter of options. A girl’s gotta have options. And there are certainly plenty of Illamasqua powder blush shades to choose from. These two look fairly similar in the pan but are quite different when applied.

As a pink-toned gal I sometimes have trouble with blushes that are betwixt and between pink and peach shades. As it happens, I can also wear peach shades fairly well but the territory in-between peach and pink is often unflattering on me. So I am trying to emulate the McDLT (remember that?) and keep the hot side hot and the cool side cool — which is to say, keep my pink blushes pink and my peach ones peach.

Both Tremble and Unrequited are cool shades of pink; Tremble is paler while Unrequited is more vibrant. (That’s an understatement. Unrequited is electric and I have to be very careful how much to apply or I look like I’ve been hit with pink paintballs on my cheeks.) They feel very smooth and don’t kick up a lot of powder when the brush sweeps over the product.

The only criticism I have of these, and it’s one I’m having of most powder blushes lately, is that they don’t last as long as I’d like — which is to say, 18-24 hours. But since I have this complaint of many powder blushes at the moment, it’s not really fair to hold that against Illamasqua in particular.

Swatch!

Unrequited on the left, Tremble on the right. In the photo at the top of the post, Unrequited is on top and Tremble on the bottom.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Illamasqua powder blusher: $24 at Sephora

Provenance: Purchased.

Price/Value Ratio (high-end: poor/fair/good/excellent): Good.

Purchase again? Yes, or at least I’ll try other shades. I probably won’t get through a single one of these in my lifetime.

(Have you used this product? Love it? Hate it? Want it? Give a holler in the comments!)

Review: Illamasqua Cream Blusher in Promise

By Voxy  |  2010/09/28 07:00 Posted in blush, Makeup, Product Reviews  |  Comments (3)

Illamasqua is another of those brands I’d wanted to try for a long time, but because they aren’t sold in any brick-and-mortar Sephora stores near me, I haven’t been able to check them out in person. I admit I do like to walk into stores and ask if they carry the line just because the name is so fun to say — the “qu” is pronounced as in “sesquipedalian,” or “hemidemisemiquaver,” or “Quiet, Quentin! I am quite sure I did answer questions and queries about the quiz, so quit quailing and quivering querulously!”

(You can tell it’s a low point in the semester when using “qu” words amuses me — or when I wind up in a corner with my arms covering my head, rocking back and forth and muttering the name of a cosmetics line over and over. If you happen to come across me in such a situation, please send vodka martinis. Vox brand vodka obviously preferred.)

My first Illamasqua purchase was a cream blush (or “blusher,” as they quaintly call it) in shade Promise, which is a cool but bright pink. Illamasqua is probably best known for their eyeshadows and pigments, but you all know I’ve been questing after cream and gel blushes, so how could I resist?

In the land of cream blushes, there is frequently a disconnect between what it looks like in the compact and how it looks on your cheeks. Promise is very much a what-you-see-is-what-you-get color: an exquisitely delicate cool pink. Unlike Tarte cheek stains, which are sheer, this is a true cream blush: opaque, milky, blendable.

While overall I like the product very much, I do have a few … quibbles. Its lasting power is not quite as long as I expect from cream and gel blushes (but I think I have probably been rather thoroughly spoiled by Stila Convertible Colors, which last all day and into the evening without complaint). I also wish they came in a larger quantity of shades: in the US, these are Sephora exclusives, and there are only five shades available — Promise (cool petal pink), Betray (described as “deep plum rose,” but dang, that swatch looks positively purple to me), Libido (bright orange-red), Lies (light pearly pink), and Rude (pinky-coral).

Quality-wise, the product lives up to expectations: it’s easy to apply and blend, though I suspect that people whose skin is strongly yellow-toned might have trouble with this particular shade. The packaging is attractive and distinctive — a stylized square with extra-pointy corners — and while packaging itself [almost] never sells me on a product, I admit it’s part of the allure.

Sasquatch! Swatch!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Illamasqua Cream Blusher in Promise: $24 at Sephora

Provenance: Acquired by purchase.

Price/Value Ratio (high-end: poor/fair/good/excellent): Quite good.

Purchase again? Unquestionably!

(Have you used this product? Love it? Hate it? Want it? Give a holler in the comments!)

Review: NARS Blush in Amour

By Voxy  |  2010/08/22 09:08 Posted in blush, Makeup, Product Reviews  |  Comments (4)

That’s “amour,” not “armour.” For some bizarre reason I keep wanting to put an extra R in there — and it’s not even Talk-Like-A-Pirate Day! Arrr!

Regrettably, I have been unsuccessful in achieving satisfaction with NARS Orgasm, after repeated attempts. (There. Happy? Enough double entendre there for you?) I also tested other NARS blushes in-store that seemed to be more glitter than pigment, so in spite of the general squeeing over NARS blushes I was doubtful that I’d find one I could wear without looking like a disco ball.

NARS Amour, I am happy to say, has exactly zero glitter or shimmer (it’s completely matte, as far as I can see), and is a lovely shade of rose. Other web descriptions call it “peachy-pink,” but there ain’t no peaches in here as fur as I can see. It’s pink. And a very pretty shade of pink, I must say — unless you accidentally put on too much (which is too say, you look at the container slightly too hard), in which case it starts to be a feverish sunburn shade of pinkish-red.

Like other NARS powder blushes, Amour comes in a rectangular case that’s exactly the same as the ELF studio blushes except that the NARS case is slightly rubberized on the outside. Does this mean it’s actually less likely to shatter if you should happen to drop it, or does it just make you think that? In either case, not an experiment I’m willing to conduct.

This is one of the most pigmented blushes I’ve ever used, which I’m not sure is a good thing. On the one hand, no one wants to spend 20 minutes putting layer after layer of blush on until you get a teeny tiny bit of glow. On the other hand, it is so, so easy to put on too much of this product without half trying. In the end I found that either a fan brush or a stippling brush is best (for stippling, I use the Sigma version of the MAC 188, which is the smaller of the two stippling brushes).

The other difficulty this creates for me is that because you end up using so little product, the color doesn’t last on me as long as I’d like, even when I use a setting powder on top. It’s really just a matter of quantity of product — if you only put on a tiny bit, then when a tiny bit wears away, you got nothin’. I haven’t tried it with a makeup fixing spray yet, but I will the next time I wear it. I’ve been so spoiled by the “immovable-object” quality of cream and gel blushes and stains that anything else seems like a huge inconvenience. Still, the color is really beautiful and so it’s worth continuing to work at it.

Close-up and swatch!

I don’t know how I got that light of a swatch. I think maybe I just waved my arm over the compact and thought happy thoughts.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

NARS Blush in Amour: $26

Provenance: Purchased.

Price/Value Ratio (high-end: poor/fair/good/excellent): Fair. You’re not going to get a high-end blush for much less than this, but I do need it to last all day.

Purchase again? Mais oui. Arrrr!

(Have you used this product? Love it? Hate it? Want it? Give a holler in the comments!)

Review: LORAC Croc Palette

By Voxy  |  2010/08/20 07:00 Posted in blush, eyeshadow, Makeup, Product Reviews  |  Comments (4)

Don’t hate me.

I think I found a palette that I like better than the UD Naked Palette.

<ducks to avoid flying pieces of rotten vegetables>

All right, as well as the UD Naked Palette. OK?

I still love my UD, but I picked this one up for travel and ended up using it almost every day I was away, which is really rare for me (I am so fickle!). The colors appealed to me because they lean towards copper rather than bronze, and they make my green eyes pop really well. The Naked palette tends to lean towards yellower shades, and those make me look a little jaundiced if I’m not careful. I purchased some LORAC shadows from HauteLook several months ago and hated them, so I was really dubious about these, but the colors were just too nice to resist.

The LORAC Croc Palette has four eyeshadows: Moonstone (soft champagne), Serenity (peachy champagne bronze), Garnet (copper), and Suede (chocolate). Suede is matte; all the others have shimmer. The palette also includes a powder blush in shade Soul, which is a browned rose that I probably won’t use much until fall really kicks in; it’s a little dark for summer. The eyeshadows are nicely well-pigmented and very smooth; I had a little bit of fallout during application, but nothing that wasn’t easily removed — and that frankly couldn’t have been prevented had I been less hasty in application. They did not crease over TFSI and they stayed vibrant all day. The palette does not come with a brush (yay!!! no extra cost for bad mini-brushes!), so you’ll have to use your own, which is better anyway. The outside of the case is faux croc, and it has a magnetic closure, which is nice to make sure the palette doesn’t open itself up in your purse.

Moonstone and Serenity are not all that different from one another; I used Moonstone as a wash, Serenity on the lid, Garnet in the crease, and Suede in the outer corner. The photos below show the colors applied over TFSI with Neutrogena Spiced Chocolate eyeliner, Tarte Lights, Camera, Lashes! mascara, and Tarte emphasEYES brow pencil. (Unrelated: New Blogger Lesson #51 — Taking pictures of eye makeup is hard. I just discovered a whole new thing I suck at!)

Swatches and photos:

L-R: Soul blush; Suede, Garnet, Serenity, Moonlight eyeshadows

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

LORAC Croc Palette: $36

Provenance: Purchased

Price/Value Ratio (high-end: poor/fair/good/excellent): Good.

Purchase again? Yes, and they’ve got a new one out for the fall that’s tempting me.

(Have you used this product? Love it? Hate it? Want it? Give a holler in the comments!)