Sleek Vintage Romance Collection

Sleek released this collection for autumn 2013 a couple of weeks ago consisting of a blush (around £4.50) and 12-shade iDivine eyeshadow palette (around £8). I really loved the look of the eyeshadows which I thought looked perfect for autumn but I wasn’t sure if I was going to pick up the blush or not. When I swatched it on the back of my hand in the shop though it was so sparkly and pretty looking I decided to pick it up as well.

The products come in brightly decorated cardboard boxes with a lovely rustic autumnal theme. They definitely say autumn but I’m not sure how well they match the theme of “Vintage Romance”. However the products themselves come in the usual plain black plastic packaging, with the shade names printed on the backs.

I really love the eyeshadow palette which is my current favourite, the colour selection suits the current weather and daylight so well with its selection of decadent jewel and earth tones. The shades come in a finish of shimmer, matte and metallic finishes. As is Sleek’s normal practise these days the palette comes with a plastic overlay with the shade names printed on it. As I usually take a photo of this for my blog I just throw the plastic overlay away as I can always check on my computer afterwards if I want to know what a particular shade name is and I find it quite annoying to have to deal with every time I open the palette.

Maybe the text isn’t so clear in the photo above so I’ll type the names out here for reference.

Top row, left to right: Pretty in Paris, Meet in Madrid, Court in Cannes, Lust in LA, Romance in Rome, Propose in Prague

Bottom row, left to right: A Vow in Venice, Marry in Monte Carlo, Honeymoon in Hollywood, Bliss in Barcelona, Forever in Florence, Love in London

I actually think that the names are quite cute!

Here’s a better shot of the colours in the palette, this time with the plastic overlay removed.

And here are the shadows swatched on my forearm, in the same order as they appear in the palette.

As you can see – wonderful colours, wonderful pigmentation – just wonderful!

I’m not quite so enamoured with the blush, Antique. It’s a very warm brown, but the shimmer is blue and I’m just not convinced that the brown and the shimmer actually go well together. The first time I wore this blush on my cheeks I used way too much and thought it looked awful. Since then I’ve trained myself to start by applying a tiny amount and building the colour up if I want more intensity. The more you buff this colour over the skin the more it acts as a highlighter as the shimmer becomes more apparent. It’s quite an interesting effect, but I’m not sure I’m a fan. Perhaps due to the blue it would work better on cooler skintones (my skintone is very warm). It is very pigmented though so I might try it out as an eyeshadow.

My current favourite colour combination from the eyeshadow palette is Court in Cannes paired with Honeymoon in Hollywood. The purple is so intense that I was worried it might stain my lids but I wear it over a primer and it’s simple to remove with some make-up remover. The shadows last all day on me worn over an eyeshadow base. In the photo below I’m also wearing a tiny bit of  the blush which you can see ever so slightly on my cheekbones and the tip of my nose.

Oh and I’ve just noticed that this eyeshadow compliments the hoodie that I’m wearing which is good as it’s one of my favourites, ha! An added bonus.

Smokey Brown with MUA

MUA have just released a whole raft of new products so I placed an order last weekend and my goodies arrived a few days later. I had a chance to play around with them this weekend and came up with this look yesterday, where all the products that I used except for my face powder are by MUA.

Above: the selection of products that I used. Clockwise from top left: Undress Your Skin Illuminating Foundation in Porcelain (£5 RRP but purchased on special offer at £3), eyeshadow palette in Undressed (£4), Pro-Base Conceal and Brighten Kit in Porcelain (£3.50 RRP but purchased on special offer at £2.50), Mega Volume Mascara in Brown (£3), MUA powder blusher in shade 2 (£1), Undress Your Skin highlighting powder (£3 RRP but purchased on special offer at £2), MUA Lip Boom in OK.com (£3)

I also used an Intense eye colour pencil in rich brown (£1 RRP but purchased on special offer as a free gift) which I forgot to include in my photograph, oops! It’s a brilliant product and I definitely recommend checking out their range of pencils. They basically tick all the boxes – soft and smooth to apply, highly pigmented and very long lasting. And as an added bonus, they even come with an integrated pencil sharpener in the lid!

If you’re interested in the maths then the total that I paid for all these products came to just £18.50 which is an absolute bargain for a full face of make-up. But let’s move on to some product swatches and mini-reviews to see if they are actually any good.

I haven’t swatched the Illuminating foundation on my arm but you can see it on my face in the pictures at the top of my post. It’s a very light, warm toned shade so it’s actually a pretty good match for my skin tone. I’m not a big fan of the consistency though, which I find to be a bit sticky and difficult to blend. It’s much easier to apply if worn on top of the Undress Your Skin Flawless Face Primer (also from the MUA Undress Your Skin Range, not pictured here) but I can’t really be bothered with the hassle of layering so many products just for the coverage of a foundation. I’ll definitely be using this foundation up but I probably won’t be repurchasing it.

I’ve already swatched the Undressed palette in this post. I really like this product and at £4 it’s definitely worth checking out if you’re a fan of neutral eyeshadows.

The Pro-Base Conceal and Brighten Kit comes in three shades, of which mine is the lightest, and contains two concealers and a highlighter. One concealer is cool toned (excellent at covering dark circles under the eyes) while the other one is warm toned. My skin is very warm toned so it’s quite a good match for me already, but since there are two shades you can mix them to create your own perfect match. All three products have a very sticky, oily consistency which I think works well for the concealers (the lasting power is quite good as long as you set them with powder) but I don’t like this consistency as a highlighter. It’s also quite pigmented so for me it’s more similar to a cream blush. I would only use the highlighter in the summer if I was going out with very light coverage and not powdering my skin, otherwise I don’t think it would fit in with the rest of my make-up.

 

The Undress Your Skin highlighter has already been compared by some to MAC’s Whisper of Gilt extra dimension skin finish, but as you can see from my swatch above it’s a completely different shade. It’s a pale white pink but Whisper of Gilt, as the name suggests, is very golden (a light, yellow gold) and personally I think they’re completely different.

Above: Whisper of Gilt, and left-most in swatches.

The highlighter actually has quite a nice finish and it’s my favourite product from MUA’s new Undress Your Skin range.

The Mega Volume mascara has a plastic wand packed with bristles. It actually works quite well on my stubby, sparse lashes and I could definitely see myself buying it again as I find mascaras quite over-priced in general, especially as I’ve never found one that I’ve considered particularly amazing.

I’ve also reviewed the blush already which you can read about in this post. It’s not my favourite blush ever but they’re good to try if you want to find out which shades you like best as they are all wearable and only £1 each (so you could buy the whole range for £6!)

I’ve been meaning to try out the MUA Lip Booms for a while but I only got round to buying this one a couple of weeks ago. The Lip Boom contains a matte lipstick in one end and an extremely glittery lip gloss in the other. There are currently eight shades in the range but I have to admit that some of the colour combinations do seem a bit strange. I went for this caramel nude and orange glitter combo which I’m really pleased with. The lipstick glides on quite well for a matte finish (often I find matte formulae very dry) and lasts me from the morning until lunchtime. The lipgloss is a nice colour but it is very glittery and consequently a bit gritty. I tend to either wear it alone or just a dab of it in the middle of my bottom lip if I’m wearing it over the lipstick. I’m just wearing the lipstick in the first photo at the top of this post.

To conclude: a mixed bag of products but on the whole more hits than misses. My must-have from the new Undress Your Skin range is the highlighter, the Undressed Palette is great value for money, their eye pencil range is brilliant – the quality is simply incredible given that they only cost £1 each - and if you like matte lipsticks then the lip booms are definitely worth checking out because even if you don’t get any use out of the lip gloss £3 is still great value for money for a good quality lipstick.

MAC Heavenly Creature–Summer 2012

After the excitement of last week’s outdoor photoshoot (here) it’s back to the indoor photo studio this week – i.e. my living room! Today I thought I’d share some pics of and thoughts on the MAC Summer 2012 mineralize collection Heavenly Creature as I’ve had these products for a month now so I’ve had some time to play around with them.

MAC isn’t really my favourite make-up brand and I find it quite expensive but I was travelling through an airport last month and since I hadn’t really tried much of their mineralize make-up before I thought it was as good an opportunity as any to pick up some pieces from their latest collection. I’ve given the current prices from their website below which include VAT but I paid 20% less at the airport.

I bought a mineralize skin finish (MSF) in the shade Star Wonder (£21.50 for 7g) and a mineralize blush in the shade Solar Ray (£19 for 3.2g).  Let’s look at some photos first before getting down to some number crunching…

Above left Solar Ray; right Star Wonder

Above top Solar Ray; bottom Star Wonder

Swatches left Solar Ray, right Star Wonder.  Top swatches intense, bottom swatches blended out.

Both products are very shimmery with Solar Ray being exceptionally glittery as well, which can hopefully be seen somewhat in the skin swatches.  Both products are in fact pigmented enough to be worn as blushes but the price per gram of the blush is £5.94 while the skin finish comes in at £3.07 per gram, meaning that weight for weight it actually works out 48% cheaper than the blush.  Therefore I’d say that if you’re looking for a product that you intend to use a lot your best bet is to go for one of the MSFs – there are four shades available in this collection ranging from light pink to dark plum. I’ve been using Star Wonder as my everyday blush since I got it (you can see it on my cheeks and more pics in this post) and I’m really pleased with both the pigmentation, application and longevity of the product so I would definitely consider buying more MSF in the future.  I do quite like Solar Ray actually because it’s not apologetic – it’s a loud, glittery orange and proud of it!  Unfortunately for me I was wearing this the day they decided to update our staff photos at work so I ended up with an orange face in mine, but I do think it’s good fun.  It’s really expensive compared to the MSF though.

Next up let’s take a look at the two eyeshadows I bought – the medium brown shade Earthly and the light silvery blue shade Bright Moon.

These retail in the UK at £16.50 for 1.8g. The selling point of these has to be the beautiful swirling pattern of the shadow in the pan - there are three different three distinct veins of colour and shimmer clearly visible in each of these shadows.  Unfortunately though that just doesn’t translate to any complexity in the shadow once it’s applied to the skin – in the swatches above these shadows are inescapably banal; a rather dull mid-tone brown and a very run of the mill light blue.  The colours are nowhere near as interesting as either the blush or the MSF above in my opinion.  They’re good as everyday colours, quick to fling on in a hurry for work as a wash across the eyelids, but not really what I was hoping for given the price point and the beautiful pans. I would have to love the colour a lot to buy another mineralize eyeshadow.

Finally I picked up one of the skincare products in the collection, a face scrub containing volcanic ash.

Now despite having studied chemistry at uni I don’t really remember much about it at all but I don’t see many minerals in that ingredients list unless you count volcanic ash and the iron oxides, which are present in the smallest amount of any of the ingredients given that they come last in the list!  The first ingredient on the list is sucrose- yup, plain ol’ sugar. That’s what gives this product its grainy consistency and provides the physical “scrub” as you wash your face with it.

A little bit goes a long way which I was trying to illustrate above. I actually quite like the use of sucrose because, being water soluble, it dissolves the more you rub it in water, so while the scrub has a very gritty consistency when first applied it soon smoothes out.  Oh and it also tastes sweet if you ever accidentally get any on your tongue! The back of the packaging recommends use once to three times a week. This retails at £21 for 100ml and I would expect this to last me up to six months of use as directed.

MAC In Extra Dimension

I would like to start this post with a disclaimer that what you are about to see does represent a horrendous amount for me to have spent on make-up at one time, but what can I say?  I was feeling quite stressed the week I bought all of this and buying make-up calms me down!!

MAC released a collection called In Extra Dimension about a month ago which comprised three Skin Finishes, ten eyeshadows, and a couple of brushes.  They’re mostly still available online so if you’re interested in this collection there’s still time to check it out.  I was quite interested after seeing the initial promotional pics and the trickle of initial reviews on the blogosphere so I thought I’d pick up a couple of items.  Well, in the end I bought three eyeshadows (£16.50 each) and a skinfinish (£20.50) then sat there wondering how long I’d have to skim a bit off my lunch money each day to pay for it all lol.  These products are ridiculously expensive but at the time I had to have them.  Anyway onto some pics.

Genuine MAC products never have the shade name printed on the box; instead they have a sticker with the shade name on it, as with the box above. The containers themselves also have a sticker on the back with the shade name.

Above, clockwise from left: eyeshadow in Grand Galaxy, skinfinish in Whisper of Gilt, eyeshadow in Havana, eyeshadow in Modern Pewter.

Below, clockwise from top: eyeshadows in Modern Pewter, Grand Galaxy and Havana.

The colours are all quite neutral and all are very shiny.  The product comes in an interesting raised wave design on the lower half with the letters MAC pressed into the top half.  It looks pretty cool on the products when they’re new…

Above: Havana eyeshadow

Above: Modern Pewter eyeshadow

Above: Whisper of Gilt skinfinish

As you can see from the photos above, the smooth texture of the design is tarnished from the first use of the product, and I don’t think it actually looks attractive at all the way it wears.  It looks crusty and as if it’s oxidising…not very appetising at all!

Below you can see how Grand Galaxy looked brand new and after one finger swipe that I made to do a swatch.  The MAC writing has clearly been erased where my finger touched the product.

Anyway, packaging and design is one thing; how do these products actually wear on the skin?  Here are swatches on my arm.

Left to right: Whisper of Gilt, Modern Pewter, Havana, Grand Galaxy

The consistency of all the products is smooth and creamy. They are in fact being marketed as a new gel-to-powder formula…hmm, whatever.  Me, Modern Pewter and Havana have gotten along just fine each time I’ve worn them to date – the colour in the swatches above is how they appear on me when worn as eyeshadow and I have no issues with application or wear.  They last fine all day over a primer.  I like Modern Pewter in particular as it’s quite an unusual colour, an olive gold, and I don’t really have anything similar in my collection already.  Grand Galaxy I just can’t comment on as I haven’t worn it yet.

Whisper of Gilt however is a disaster on me.  I can’t even get it to last four hours on my combination skin.  I can see it when I apply it in the mornings, then by lunchtime it’s just totally disappeared.  It’s annoying and frustrating given how much I paid for it and I actually wish I hadn’t bought it.  I know that not every brand can make all of its products into hits for everybody and I had read practically nothing about this product but glowing reviews from other bloggers but with products as expensive as these it’s really not something I want to be bitten by twice.  For this reason I’m kind of sick of MAC at the moment and the inconsistent quality of the products that I’ve tried and I’m not going to be picking anything else up from them for a while.  Not that I haven’t already got enough products to keep me going for about the next ten years anyway I guess!