A lovely beauty blogging friend (see her stuff here!) decided to unload this gorgeous palette on me! It was one I had always looked at but hadn’t gotten around to buying just yet. Behold, the freaking stunning BH Cosmetics Galaxy Chic 18-pan palette!
The shadows are all baked, so you can use them wet and dry!
Brand new products from BECCA aways fill me with excitement (currently itching to get my hands on the new blushes, but they haven’t been in a store near me yet!!) and the Aqua Luminous Perfecting Foundation was no different!
BECCA‘s Aqua Luminous Perfecting Foundation claims it is “a light, buildable, liquid foundation that imparts subtle luminosity with a weightless feel”. It comes in a beautiful frosted glass bottle with a metal lid. It’s compact and sleek – all things I love!
The foundation is dispensed by a dropper type system. When you twist the lid off the foundation, the top pops up and helps you pump out product into the dropper. When you close the bottle up, the popped top then closes down to make it flush with the rest of the cap. It’s actually a really neat system.
The dropper is as one would expect, although I would say that with a full bottle of foundation, I really only ever manage to get the dropper half full. I usually need about two of these to cover my full face. Side note: this is a VERY liquid foundation, make sure you shake the bottle up very well before using it!
When the Aqua Luminous Perfecting foundation first launched, there wasn’t a ton of shades, so I opted to try out Fair and Light. I thought that Fair would be a bit too pale for me, but that actually turned out to be totally incorrect. They’ve since added more shades to their range and I think Porcelain would be a better match for my winter skintone. (They’ve also added more dark shades as well!)
You can see Fair and Light swatched above. They are significantly darker than I was expecting for shades with that name and they do lean quite warm. And yet… I don’t know what it is about my face… because somehow it oddly all manages to balance out:
I really wasn’t expecting Fair to be the colour match that it ended up being, but it works well on my skin! You can also see just how radiant it makes my skin too! That is some fairly ethereal glow going on there!
I do have a few thoughts on this foundation though, so bear with me.
I think this is a foundation you’re going to have to decide for yourself if you’re going to love it based on what I said above. I was astonished with just how many people commented on the appearance of my skin while I was wearing it though! If you’ve tried this foundation, I would love to hear what you thought about it!
The BECCA Aqua Luminous Perfecting Foundation can be purchased on sephora.ca for $53 CAD or on sephora.com for $44 USD.
The product featured in this review was sent to me for review.
While my face may be on the dry side of things, I struggle with super freaking oily eyelids. If you’ve seen any of my makeup tutorials on my YouTube channel, you’ll often see me applying two separate eyeshadow primers to make sure my eyeshadow doesn’t crease on me throughout the day. Long gone are the days of using a single eyeshadow primer (although the Maybelline Master Prime gives me *almost* creaseless perfection!) for me it seems!
That being said, I am ALWAYS happy to try a new one out! Kat Von D recently released her Lock-It Color Correcting Eyeshadow Primer in a whopping five shades. You may think five shades is nothing, but have you ever stopped to consider that eyeshadow primers are (for the most part) quite clear? Most of them offer little to no coverage for our veiny eyelids which is a struggle for people who enjoy wearing paler eyeshadow shades but also have a lot of veins and discolouration on their eyelids that they want to cover. The five shades range from fair to deep and I think it’s actually an impressive array considering that this is “only” an eyeshadow primer! (For example, there are brands out there that ONLY have four shades of foundation! Looking at you Joe Fresh!)
The brand indicates that the “formula color corrects your specific skintone to neutralize lids so that you can show off super-saturated, true color payoff.” It also comes in a nifty twist up stick for easy application.
It does come with a sharpener on the opposite end, but I can’t imagine why you’d need to sharpen this product – it’s not like precise lines are needed to cover your eyes. Regardless, it’s there if you need it!
The shade Fair is quite brightening on my skin and a tad bit pinker. I will point out the formula is on the dry side of things, so I end up applying the Lock-It primer by first running it on my eyelids, then blending it out with a finger to help warm up and spread the product out.
I know people like comparisons, so here we go! The shot on the left is from 7:30 am before I went to work, and the short on the right is when I got home at 5:00 pm. It looks flawless doesn’t it? There is no creasing whatsoever, and the colours are just as vibrant as ever (except for maybe my transition shade). However… this photo kind of annoyed me, because this is not an accurate reflection of how the primer always behaved. Sometimes I had severe creasing on my lids, and sometimes I didn’t. It was almost impossible to tell which days my eyeshadow would crease and which days it wouldn’t. I actually took the above time lapse photos to show you how much it could crease on me, but instead that very same day my eyeshadows stayed intact. *throws hands up in the air*
The Kat Von D Lock-It Color Correcting Eyeshadow Primer worked for me… sometimes. And that’s not a claim I’m overly comfortable with. If I can’t rely on my primer to work 100% of the time, then I’m going to double up on primers because I am not going to risk having my eyeshadow crease on me while I’m out. (Doubled up, this worked just fine for me!)
I love that Kat Von D offers five different shades to create a blank canvas on a wide variety of skintones. I think that’s especially important because it highlights the fact that companies are finally realizing there isn’t a one colour fits all for beauty products, and that’s extremely encouraging.
If you’re someone that doesn’t struggle with greasepit eyelids, I think this is a perfectly satisfactory eyeshadow primer that creates a blank canvas that makes your eyeshadows pop. But if you’re like me, and you need something more like super glue for your eyelids, I don’t think this is a primer you can wear on its own. That being said, I have blogger friends that this worked far better on, so please check out Swatch and Review and Workaday Beauty‘s posts on this primer!
The Kat Von D Lock-It Color Correcting Eyeshadow Primer can be purchased on sephora.ca for $33 CAD or on sephora.com for $25 USD.
The product featured in this post was went to be for consideration.
This Naked Cosmetics Ivory Stack is a group of absolutely gorgeous duochrome pigment that all start off with a white base, but reflects a beautiful colour!
Since the colours are so pale, I decided to swatch them with both a white and a black base so you can see just how much the colour changes.
Clinique keeps adding more and more beautiful shades and textures to their Pop lineup and it always excites me to see what new they’ve come up with next! Say hello the Pop Lacquers!
Clinique describes their Pop Lacquers as “a luscious pop of liquid, high-shine colour in one, full-coverage coat. Luxurious yet lightweight formula with built-in primer glides on effortlessly, wears for up to six hours”. Sadly, I kind of struggled with these.
My first complant is that the applicator isn’t the usual doe-foot, and instead it’s more like a lightbulb shape. It’s round the entire way around which seems to really facilitate poor application. I ended up with streaks and too much product pushed out to the edges of my lip line (so it kind of gave me that lip liner look…).
When I finally did get the lip product on right, it definitely didn’t wear anywhere near six hours and instead started to fade off within about an hour. Even worse was that after only an hour I had intense lip line bleed out around the edges of my lips. And it’s not like I had been talking either when I noticed this. I had been sitting at my desk for the last hour, sipping water from a straw so as not to disturb the lip colour and I might’ve answered my phone once. If that’s what happened from such little activity, I absolutely cannot trust this to last me if I’m out having drinks – I would end up with this all over my face!
The colours, if you can make the formula work, are lovely however! They are intensely bright and beautiful to behold. These are definitely a tacky gloss and I found them very reminiscent of MAC’s lip glasses.
Happy Pop is a gorgeous vibrant mandarin orange.
Sweetie Pop is a vibrant pink that’s bordering on neon.
Love Pop is a muted mauve/pink with a bit of shimmer. The shimmer is not actually apparent on the lips though!
Peace Pop is an intense purple with hints of red.
Sadly, although I was really excited to try out the Clinique Pop Lacquers, they just didn’t work out for me. The very short wear time/fading off combined with the lip line bleed out make it impossible for me to wear these without constantly glancing in a mirror. Although my face shots above show a decent looking lip product, the reality is that those were taken in quick succession and were only worn momentarily (you can make any product look good for a brief moment in time!). In practice, they just didn’t hold up for me. 🙁 That being said, my friend Zoë over at Writing Whimsy had a better experience with these, so please be sure to check out her post!
The Clinique Pop Lacquers can be purchased on sephora.ca for $21 CAD each or on sephora.com for $18 USD each.
The products featured in this post were sent to me for consideration.