I have been wearing MAC products for a very, VERY long time. My aunt first introduced me to the brand because I needed to get some makeup for my figure skating competitions in order to bring out my features while I was performing on the ice. I was 12 years old at the time… and now I’m 35. So I’ve been stuck on this brand for a solid 23 years.  Heck, I remember when MAC lipsticks used to look like this:

And that blasted MAC logo on the middle rim would always wear off because it was printed onto metal! I remember when MAC eyeshadows cost $10.25 CAD and were cheaper in Canada than they were in the USA (I was going to pick up a shadow or two when I was in New York City when I was 16 and was horrified that they were $12.50! AMERICAN!).

Anyway, I digress. My point is that I’ve been wearing MAC for a lot time and I do actually have products that are over the 20 year mark in my collection (powders only – I’ve long ditched any creams). One of my favourite products circa 1996 was MAC‘s Iridescent Powder in Silver Dusk, which is what this post is centered around. I had (have) a *HUGE* tub of it that I’ve been using for over two decades now and the thing is literally magical as I’m not anywhere near halfway done.

Silver Dusk is this beautiful pink-ish powder with unreal silver shimmer flecks suspended within the power. In 1996, 13 year old me was astonished by this product. It was likely fairy dust, unicorn tears and diamonds come to life.

I used to put it everywhere.

Literally.

All over my face, my arms, my neck – anywhere I had exposed skin, this stuff would go. I just wanted to SPARKLE. The reflection on it is fairly intense too – splash this all over your body and you do end up looking like a disco ball.

Of course, it’s come to my attention recently that having a 23 year old powder is kinda gross. And even worse is that my older packaging is looking really rough. And it’s because this tub of glory has been with me everywhere – I used to scoop out little spoonful and give to my friends in sample jars so they could experience the glory of it. I took the whole bloody thing with me on a family vacation to France in 1998 (I was also proudly hauling around my MAC Vellum, Orb and Haux eyeshadows, alongside a particularly hideous shade of pink lipstick by MAC called X-pose as well as the every lovely Cosmo). Suffice to say, I brought this sucker with me everywhere – it was beauty itself personified in my eyes.

MAC has discontinued and brought this powder back more times than I can remember in the last ten years. When I finally decide to bite the bullet and buy it again (which honestly felt stupid because I still had so much left *and* it doesn’t smell funny whatsoever), they upped and discontinued it before I took the plunge. I was pissed because it seems it was now gone forever.

However… two years later they brought it back around the time MAC launched at Sephora and I snagged it when they were having one of their sales. I was over the moon – I finally had a new version of my beloved powder!

So… how does it stack up? Well, you can definitely see they’ve reduced the size of the packaging, although that happened many, MANY years ago when MAC started rebranding all of their packaging to the more matte black/charcoal you see today (back in the 90s the packaging was actually more of a glossy black). But honestly, my tub lasted me so bloody long that having that huge packaging was clearly not necessary.

The most significant change though is definitely to the colour. The 2018 version of Silver Dusk is definitely more pink than the one I have from 1996. That being said… it’s entirely possible that my tub has been left out on a ledge exposed to a lot of sun over the years so it may have lost some of its colour over the years.

Swatched out you can definitely see more of the pink in the 2018 version. And it’s funny… I remember reading that Silver Dusk was a “pink/peach with silver shimmer” recently, but I had never mentally processed the powder as looking that way. To me, Silver Dusk always applied with a translucent base jampacked with silver-white glimmer. So I don’t really know if it actually has changed over the years, or if my memory of it has just warped over time (alongside the bleached out colour).

On the cheeks this powder is just as glorious as ever. It’s a little more subtle than today’s blinding highlighters, but there’s also more tiny flecks of shimmer in the product in comparison to what you’d expect a highlighter to look like nowadays. If you put this everywhere on your face (as I used to do), you will look like a glimmering diamond though!

I still feel like it’s ever so slightly different from my old pot and, because of that, it makes me not want to throw out my old relic. But let’s be real here… over the years I gradually stopped reaching for my old tub of Silver Dusk simply because it was SO old. I’m happy to have the new one, but it’s just not the *same*, you know? And maybe that’s because I have so many memories tied to it. Heck, I wonder if a MAC rep would even let me take the product back to them for Back2MAC… I doubt they’d even recognize the packaging!

Either way, I’m happy to have gotten a new Silver Dusk as it’s one of those makeup items I feel really attached to. If you want to snag MAC‘s Iridescent Powder in Silver Dusk, you can pick it up at sephora.ca for $33 CAD or on maccosmetics.com for $29 USD.

So tell me – do you feel this way about a particular product in your collection? Do you have fond memories of an old product that maybe you can’t get anymore? Tell me!