Category Archives: Reviews
Tarte Amazonian Clay Blushes (My Collection – Review & Swatches)
Oh man… Tarte Amazonian Clay Blushes… you have stolen my heart over and over again over the years. In my whole collection, Tarte blushes are the ones that are definitely the most numerous – be it in singular format, or in palettes – I’ve got a lot of them!
I really feel like Tarte‘s blushes are the original powerhouse behind the brand. In my mind, they’re the real reason the brand started to get more and more recognition about eight or so years ago. Everyone was picking up these blushes, and with good reason – they are LOVELY!
The Amazonian Clay Blushes have gone through a little bit of repackaging over the years I’ve been snatching them up. They used to come with a little swirl pattern around the logo (which I preferred), but in more recent years they’ve removed the flower swirl and put only their logo on the front of the compact.
I also love that you can pop out each pan from their compact! And this isn’t a new feature either – the shot above of is of my oldest Tarte blush (Blissful) and I think it’s about 7 years old! This is fantastic for people who like to depot their blushes – you won’t have to deal with breaking up the glue to remove the pan and risk smashing your powder.
My single pan compacts get a lot of love from me. Blissful was the first shade I ever owned (my husband bought it for me for Christmas one year), and I just fell head over heels after that. Exposed is clearly my most used (that’s the one with the pan showing!) – it’s the most boring shade in the pan, but holy smokes does it ever look gorgeous on the cheeks! It absolutely transforms my face! Natural Beauty (the red) is a shade I go back to all the time for that “come in from the cold” look that I’m fond of in the winter (plus it works GREAT for any red lipstick or red eyeshadow look I put together!).
Heavily swatched, the Tarte Blushes are full of pigment and colour, but don’t worry, they blend out easily. One thing worth mentioning is that I do find the product to be a bit stiff in the pan. While they do bush out nicely, you need a solid brush to pick up the colour. I find that most “typical” blush brushes don’t work very well, so I prefer to use a short duo fiber brush like the MAC 130 to work the blush into my cheeks.
I never picked up the Pin Up Girl Palette, but a lovely reader of mine (hi Tanya!) sent this holiday launch to me a few years back when she realized how much I loved Tarte blushes!
What I love about this particular palette is that the breadth of colours was extensive – it pretty much runs the gamut from nude through to mauve. I was incredibly impressed with the variety – this is what I love to see in a blush palettes! I want wildly different colours, not iterations of the same colour over and over again.
I’ve saved the best for last – Tarte‘s Off The Cuff palette from Holiday 2013. This palette is a mainstay in my travel makeup bag – I take it practically everywhere with me because the blush colours are (once again) extremely varied, AND it has a bronzer in it! I wish more blush/face palettes were like this one – give me a bronzer and/or highlighter alongside the blushes please!
Crave is easily my favourite shade in the palette as it’s a bright coral, but I’ve also fallen really hard for Dollface. Dollface is one of those shades, much like Exposed, that everyone used to talk about. For me, it’s not a shade I’m drawn to because it’s a cool-toned baby pink and to me that shade is too “girly” for my liking. Well low and behold it’s hands down one of the most flattering shades I own!
Final Thoughts
I freaking LOVE Tarte‘s blushes! While I don’t find myself snatching up all of the latest colours or palettes in more recent years, it’s because I’ve already got such a huge array of shades in my collection via singles and palettes. Exposed and Blissful are my absolute favourite shades, and thankfully they’re both still available (a few of the shades mentioned in this post have been discontinued over the years). And the fact that I actually hit pan on a blush? Well that speaks volumes I think! (It’s literally the first and ONLY blush I’ve ever hit pan on!) My only regret? I never got the shade Tipsy while it was available – it will forever be the one that got away!
Tarte Amazonian Clay Blushes can be purchased on sephora.ca for $38 CAD each or on sephora.com for $29 USD each.
The blush "Sensual" was sent to me for consideration, a reader sent me the Pin Up Girl palette and everything else was purchased by me. Post contains affiliate links.
Anastasia Beverly Hills Dream Glow Kit (Review & Swatches)
When Anastasia Beverly Hills drops a new Glow Kit, I stop, drop and order it. I have fallen in love more times than I can count with these Glow Kits, so I always want to ensure I’m getting my hands on the latest one!
ABH‘s most recent Glow Kit release is titled Dream, and it was developed with deeper skin tones in mind. Over the last few years there’s been a few mentions that highlighting powders tend to have too much white pigment in them which ends up looking quite ashy on darker skintones. The intent with this palette was to remove any of the white pigments used to create these highlighter with the expectation that it would end up looking better on deeper skin tones (however, it was also pointed out that these shades would also work on fair tones).
But sadly, I had a lot of problems with this palette. Starting off with the price point – they jacked the price up $5 CAD, which is not in line with any of their other highlighting palettes, including other six-pan iterations they’ve released.
However, my biggest complaint is that while the shade selection appears to be diverse, in practice, it really isn’t. Once buffed into the skin, each shade takes on a different hue of pink. Some shades have a stronger pink cast than the other, but fundamentally EACH shade has a pink reflection to it which makes having six shades utterly pointless.
Anastasia Beverly Hills Dream Glow Kit Face Swatches
Wish is probably the least pink out of all of them. It’s described as a “pearl base with violet sparkles”. Yes to pearl, but the violet is actually pink.
Unicorn is labelled as a “lavender and pink sparkle cluster”, but it’s really just a solid pink.
Magic is described as having an “icy base with a kaleidoscope cluster of red, gold, pink and blue sparkles”. Icy base? Sure. Kaleidoscope cluster with all of those colours? Oh hell no. This basically a patina shade with pink reflect. And although it doesn’t look super pink in the shot above, I promise you that in person the only colour I saw on my cheeks was a pink reflect with silver sparkle.
Ethereal is described as a “cool-toned lavender duo chrome with blue reflective sparkle”. Nope – it’s pink.
Oh man, I had hope for you Sunshine. Labelled a lavender gold shift, there was promise… right? Nope. It’s a pale gold with a super strong pink reflect.
And lastly, the shade I was the most excited about – Regal, a “golden pink base with a light kaleidoscope cluster of pink, gold, and blue sparkles”. Nope – it’s like a paled out peachy-pink. Definitely no kaleidoscope here.
What in the HELL happened with this palette? Maybe it’s truly not meant for me and it works on far deeper skin tones? I just don’t get it – the strongest colour that is present in all of this is a solid PINK. I first noticed it when I was swatching it on my arm and I was a little taken aback since the pans certainly don’t LOOK predominantly pink at first glance.
I started to wonder if it was just me, but I went and checked out the reviews on Sephora and so many people are pointing out just how pink this palette is. And it’s irritating when the pans themselves are so deceiving – the swatches will let you think that this palette has a lot of variety to offer, but as soon as I buffed each shade into my face, all I ended up seeing was varying shades of pink. It was so weird!
The powders are also big on glitter, which is not necessarily a problem for me, but when you add in the fact that all six shades reflect pink AND glitter, it makes you wonder why they even bothered to put six shades in here. This could’ve easily been released as a split pan compact and you would’ve obtained the exact same amount of variety.
Application is also chunkier and harder than previous ABH palettes. I found I had to load up my brush and go in a few times in order to get the product to appear on my cheeks. Which is very strange, because if you stick your finger in the product it feel very soft to the touch. Impressively, the glitter DID stay put on my cheeks – it wasn’t falling out all over the place after I’d placed it on my face.
Final Thoughts
I wanted to love this, but I just don’t need that much freaking pink in my life. Six shades with varying levels of pink is just completely redundant to me. ESPECIALLY when they don’t even look pink in the pan to begin with.
This launch was a huge let down for me because I *adore* my Glow Kits – I have quite a few of them because they’re just so good. But this one isn’t versatile like the others are, and for me it’s a pass. If you freaking LOVE pink though? Get this – it’s all you’ll ever need!
The Anastasia Beverly Hills Glow Kit in Dream can be purchased at sephora.ca for $59 CAD and on sephora.com for $45 USD.
This post contains affiliate links.
Stila Glitter & Glow Liquid Eyeshadows (My Collection – Swatches & Review)
There are some makeup items in this world that inspire rabid obsessiveness in me… and the Stila Glitter & Glow Liquid Eyeshadows are one of those.
It all started rather innocently with this single Glitter & Glow in Kitten Karma that I was sent by PR many moons ago (see that full review from 2017 here). I loved it upon initial application. I was astounded by how easily the applicator applied the product (so precisely and so opaquely!), impressed by how solid the glitter intensity was, and ultimately floored that no one, until now, had created a product as miraculous as this one.
Of course, then I had a real damn problem.
I. Wanted. All. Of. Them.
These beautiful little packages of glitter heaven are $31 CAD/$24 USD apiece and I started buying them at every opportunity. I bought them at IMATS (I think I got a few of them at $10 each then!), I bought them at Sephora (at full price and during their sales) and even picking a few up at BeautyBoutique.ca. They are not cheap, but they are worth every single penny of the price tag as I have never found an easier to apply glitter product before.
So here we are – it’s a year later and I now own 11 of these beauties and I love them dearly. I used to have 12, but I ended up giving away one shade because it turned out to be so unlike all the others I had. The shade in question is Molten Midnight (black with silver sparkle) – beautiful to be sure, but it creased on me like nothing else. This was a shock as none of the other shades had done this to me! So I gave it away because I knew I would never use it. The rest of the shades though? They’re flawless!
It’s absolutely wild to be me that this simple flat doe foot applicator works so well to apply the product! I can use this little guy to apply the product opaquely to my eye and then turn it on its side and use the narrow side to feather/blend it out into my eyeshadow.
One thing not to be confused about with these is that Stila makes a Glitter & Glow product (which is what’s featured in this review), but they also make one called a Shimmer & Glow and it’s in identical packaging. Even more curious is that I feel like the consistency is not equal across all the Glitter & Glows. While some of them pack a TON of glitter, there are others in here that I would quantify as more of a shimmer (more specifically, I feel like Enchantress, Sea Siren and Into The Blue have very little glitter and far more shimmer). This can make for a bit of a confusing product – I personally love the glitter aspect and therefore expect glitter in these products, but that isn’t always exactly what you’re getting. Let’s take a look at some swatches so I can show you what I mean.
The three pictured above are the ones that definitely have the most glitter in them, which makes them hella hard to photograph (for me anyway).
- Perlina is more of a translucent base with white glitter particles that shimmer cool colours (teal, purple, pink). Oddly, Perlina fits under their “Metallic finish” under their Glitter & Glow range, and yet it’s definitely more glitter than metallic.
- Diamond Dust is a beautiful silver with probably the MOST glitter in it in out of all of the ones I own. It also reflects a rainbow of colours when looked at indirectly/out of focus.
- Gold Goddess is a soft pale gold that is pure gold glitter.
To see the colouring a bit better, I took these photos from an angle instead of straight on. You can see the glitter particles in more detail and the difference in the colours is a bit more identifiable this way.
Some of the newer releases tend to have more shimmer in them (despite being classified as Glitter & Glow), so I’m not really sure what’s going on with the formula difference, but these are still incredibly pretty!
- Gypsy is a beautiful lilac with pink pearl. This one has more shimmer than glitter in my opinion.
- Sea Siren fits in their metallic category of Glitter & Glow and it’s definitely more of a metallic duochrome that shifts purple or teal depending on the angle the shade is viewed at.
- Into The Blue is another metallic and it looks super blue in some lighting and very purple in others.
Change the angle of the shot and you can see just how much Gypsy transforms! Isn’t that colour wild?? Sea Siren and Into The Blue also show their shade range when you bend the colour around my arm such as in these swatches, which would be similar to the bend in your eye (granted, your eye is a smaller surface).
If you’re looking for some glitter without going for straight up colour, Stila does make a TON of nude and neutral shades for you to choose from. For the most part it’s a nude base with silver glitter thrown in.
- Smoky Storm is a light pewter with silver glitter.
- Kitten Karma is a champagne with silver glitter.
- Enchantress is listed as a peach with bright gold pearl on Sephora’s site, but to me it’s a pink with silver glitter.
- Rose Gold Retro is a copper with silver glitter.
- Smoldering Satin is a medium brown with silver glitter.
When you change the angle on these the colour shift isn’t really there as these aren’t duochromatic shades like the first ones I swatched. What’s neat about these is that you basically choose what colour base you like most, and then go with that shade.
To see these products in action, I do have two videos you can check out if you want to see how I use them.
The video above uses Into The Blue.
The video above uses Smoky Storm.
Final Thoughts
Although I’ve reviewed one shade before, I had to update you on just how much I love this range. Every time I get an opportunity I pick up yet another Glitter & Glow, and I think that speaks volumes. This formula is truly groundbreaking for the beauty industry! I hope that Stila continues to put out more and more of them – I’d particularly like to see them put out more colourful shades in the Glitter range (they’ve added a few colourful shades to the Shimmer line, but I’m not interested in those – I want glitter!). If you’re looking for an easy way to apply glitter, then don’t look any further than this. You won’t have to deal with loose glitter and you don’t need a specific glitter primer either – my regular ole eyeshadow primer works just fine for these!
The Stila Glitter and Glow Liquid Eyeshadows can be purchased at sephora.ca for $31 CAD each or on sephora.com for $24 USD each.
I believe I was gifted Kitten Karma, Enchantress and Smoky Storm, the rest I purchased myself. Post contains affiliate links.