If you’re looking to up your glow for the coming warmer months (if you’re in the northern hemisphere, that is!), then you may want to take a peek at Mary Kay‘s new Illuminating Drops.

The Illuminating Drops come in three different shades (Silver Sands, Golden Horizon and Bronze Light) and contain 15 mls of product – which is a TON! The average foundation bottle  has 30 mls of product, so you’re getting half of a full foundation!

The application method for the Illuminating Drops is, as you would expect with the name, dropper-style. I’m used to facial oils being in dropper-style bottles which are far less viscous than these drops, so I found it was best to push down the nozzle when you have the whole cap off the product, insert it into the bottle and then release it so that the tube can fill up. If you push the nozzle down and then release when you have the cap on, it just forces air into the bottle and you won’t actually collect any product when you release the button.

That being said, you don’t need the tube to scoop up much product for using on your face, because a little goes a very long way with the Illuminating Drops. There are three shades which (with my lack of MUA knowledge) will be able to suit the majority of skin tones.

• Silver Sands: a pearlescent pink with a soft silver cast.
• Golden Horizon: slightly golden, but not that strong in colour on my skin. Every time I look at this shade, the first thing that comes to mind is BECCA’s Champagne Pop.
• Bronze Light: the one shade that won’t really work on my skin tone because of the depth. This is a gorgeous deep bronze with golden highlights.

Silver Sands has a lovely soft pink hue that tends to come across quite silvery. I opted to pair this with cooler toned eyeshadow looks as I felt it worked best with them. It can appear quite pale at times, so I think this would work best for fair to very light skintones.

Golden Horizon initially surprised me as I thought it would be too dark for my skintone. When you blend it out it loses a lot of the pigment that’s inherent in my swatch shot above. It still maintains a golden hue, but I found it more wearable that Silver Sands just because of how it paled down.

I found these both applied best when I dropped a little bit of product onto the back of my hand, tapped it out with my finger to disperse it a bit, and then tapped it on to the tops of my cheekbones with my finger tip. A brush seemed to disturb my makeup underneath, so I definitely prefer to use my finger. I’m not generally one for finger application, but this seemed to work just fine and it blended out incredibly easily without much fuss.

Final Thoughts

These are beautiful! The Mary Kay Illuminating Drops are an easy no muss, no fuss highlighter to wear during the warmer months (or any time really) when you want that lit from within glow… but with a little bit of an extra boost of shine. It’s a healthy glow – the kind that reminds me of a beach-y face that’s been wearing sunscreen for a while and has a hint of gleam from that product. Golden Horizon was definitely my favourite of the two I tried (I didn’t try Bronze Light because it’s too deep and I just wouldn’t wear it even as a bronzer to be honest).

The products featured in this post were sent to me for consideration.

Are lip stains making a comeback?? I sure hope so! Mary Kay has launched their Lip Tints for Spring 2019, and I was so excited to try them out.

I used to love the ease of a lip stain (back when they were more readily accessible) – it feels weightless on your lips and yet adds a bunch of colour that seems to last forever. Mary Kay has released three limited edition shades that contain 0.08 oz/2.5g of product for $18 USD or $21 CAD.

The water-based lip tints are inspired by desert hues and smell of vanilla (honestly, I get more of a butterscotch smell which is really delicious). They claim to have buildable colour and a lightweight feel.

They might be buildable, but right out of the gate you can see that there is intense colour pigmentation in a swatch! The shades are really beautiful and I experienced very little feathering even in a swatch (which is impressive given that most lip stains in a pen format tend to bleed out intensely into the crevices of my skin).

Unfortunately, the story changes a little when you get these shades on the lips.

Canyon Coral is the palest of all three shades, and yet still vividly bright. I found that I did have to swipe on two layers to try to get an even coat, but even then I was left with some patches on my lip where the colour wouldn’t adhere very well. Lip stains have a tendency to cling to dry sections of your lips (so for me that’s usually the perimeter) and that became pretty obvious with this one. Even after I had let the product dry for 3-5 minutes, I pressed my lips together and the colour lifted from a large chunk of the inner rim of my mouth. I tried re-applying it, but it just wouldn’t stick on that area. Plus you can also see that it looks kinda patchy on my upper lip. The colour itself is gorgeous, but I found the application and staying power too finicky on this shade.

Desert Flora was slightly better, but again you can see the weird translucency in parts of my lip, but not everywhere. Sadly, the darker the shade, the more you’ll see lighter patches of your skin coming through. Unfortunately, I found that as soon as I licked my lips, most of the colour disappeared, even after I’d let it dry for quite a while.

Oh boy… I’ll be honest, after the last two shades I didn’t even want to try Magenta Mirage out as my previous experiences had been seriously unfortunate. But I figured maybe this would be the BEST one. Yeah… nope. The colour itself is beautiful.. but you can see it clinging for dear life to a patch of skin on my bottom lip (that doesn’t even FEEL dry to me by the way). Sadly, the worst part was that I put this lip colour on after I’d done my makeup, let it dry while I did my hair, took the picture you see above… licked my lips slightly… AND:

The colour got all over my dang tongue. I was so annoyed. Not only had I lifted most of the colour off of my lips, but now I also had a stained tongue. (And it stained for HOURS by the way… through a coffee and a bottle of water, even after I’d blotted my tongue with a paper towel.)

Final Thoughts

I can’t recommend these at all. I was so excited to use them because I used to love the Revlon Lipstains + Balm (and only just realized they’ve long since been discontinued), but these Mary Kay Lip Tints annoyed the crap out of me. The colour payoff was inconsistent on my lips, the colour mostly came off at the faintest sign of wetness (the inner rim of my lips, my tongue, even a straw), and they stained my freaking tongue. Even when they left behind a mediocre stain (like… 30% of what you see in the lip swatch photos above), it was mostly as a rim around my lips! So it looked like I had applied lip liner and nothing else.

I’m actually really sad about this… I wanted to wear Canyon Coral all summer long and now I want nothing to do with these. 🙁

The products featured in this post were sent to me for consideration.

New out by Mary Kay are four lipsticks in colours that I am very, VERY excited to see by the brand – something bold, something unique, and something to spice up their brand name!

Say hello to  their new “It” Lipstick which comes in four vibrant shades in a matte formula. Each shade retails for $20 CAD, and has a lightly sweet, soft vanilla scent. They’re out right now for a limited time only.

What makes me so excited to see these shades from this brand in particular is that Mary Kay has always been a “safe” brand. They stick to the neutral/normal shades, and don’t really go outside of that range very often. So when these shades showed up as a new launch, I was PUMPED! I want to see more excitement like this from a brand that has (for far too long I must say) been known as a grandma brand.

Pigmentation is completely opaque on the orange and the red, and somewhat patchy (but strong) on the two purples. This is fairly consistently a problem with purples in any brand, so I wasn’t that surprised to see it here as well.

Grazie, Violet is the shade that surprised me the most in this launch – it’s so unlike Mary Kay to put out a shade like this, and that just made me smile to see it. It’s a beautiful luminous purple, but it does go a bit patchy on the lips.

Holy smokes! Orange Mio is a loud orange with intense pigmentation. Love this one!

I absolutely thought Red Roma was going to be a boring, old red, but there is definitely something unique about it that I can’t quite put my finger on it. It’s almost verging on neon somehow? Neon red tends to have some pink in it, so I can see a hint of that here. Stunning!

Despite the bullet looking dang near black, Puro Mirtillo is actually a deep purple. The colour is absolutely beautiful, but this one had the biggest problems in terms of patchiness.

Final Thoughts

Each shade applies smoothly and solidly, but I had varying degrees of success with each shade. Overall, I have to say that these lipsticks perform much better without lip primer. I found this surprising as lip primer is a lifesaver for me in terms of keeping my lipstick from bleeding out at the edges and for longevity. I found that lip primer ended up making this lipstick clump up, which is something I had never experienced before. Surprisingly without lip primer these lipsticks did NOT bleed outside of my lip line – I was so impressed!

That being said, I found that the purples and orange gathered a little bit at the edge between where my exterior lip ends and the interior of my mouth begins. The red shade didn’t do this though. As for colour pigmentation, much like that swatches, the orange and red were opaque, and the purples had some patchiness (use a lip pencil underneath your lipstick to prevent that issue from standing out). For me, the red, and then the orange were the clear winners, but I really love the deeper purple shade as it looks really, really good on!

So while there are a few discrepancies between the shades and how they wore on me, I have to say I am so impressed to see Mary Kay releasing these kinds of shades. Kudos to you guys – keep it up!

 The products featured in this post were sent to me for consideration.

Mary Kay continues to be one of those brands that people don’t think much about (especially if you’re under the age of 50), but I assure you they put out some quality products (for example, they make my absolute favourite nail polish formula. Hands down, that is the best stuff I have ever tried.) So when I was sent some brow products to try out, I was keen to give them a go.

Mary Kay has just launched their Precision Brow Liners in 5 shades, two of which fit into the blonde category (Blonde and Dark Blonde) which I’ve been trying out for the last two weeks. Each retractable pencil comes with 0.085 grams of products which is on par with the ABH Brow Wiz, and a little bit short (0.005 grams to be precise) in comparison to the NYX Micro Brow. The pencils retail for $16 CAD or $14 USD. (Interestingly, the American Mary Kay site seems to have only four shades available – they’re missing Black-Brown.)

The blonde shades are much less ashy than I was expecting. Traditional blonde eyebrow pencils tend to lean more cool than warm, although I’d say that these seem neutral with a touch of warmth.

As you can see, I don’t have much brow to begin with, so I have to fill in a lot of areas and create an entire tail out of nothing.

I found that the pencils were quite soft, which made for easy application, but it could sometimes mean you didn’t get the sharpest point you wanted. I also found that the nib is slightly larger than your average micro-brow pencils, so this wouldn’t be quite as precise for creating individual hair strokes. Personally, I don’t have the patience to create individual strokes as I’m really just trying to block out a brow as quickly as possible because I’ve got so much ground to cover and fill in. So the fact that I can’t create individual hair lines with this pencil is irrelevant to me.

Final Thoughts

If you’re looking for a softer eyebrow pencil, you may want to look into the Mary Kay Precision Brow Liners. I love my NYX Micro Brow, but it does feel a bit sharp and hard on my brows, so I completely understand if people are wanting something a little bit softer. The longevity of the product was excellent too – they last through full workdays without any issue.

I was also pleasantly surprised with the colours. I didn’t think they would work that well because they weren’t grey enough, but that turned out not to be the case. I used the Dark Blonde shade to fill in the bottom of my brow, and the Blonde shade for the top half. I feel the two shades worked well together, although I definitely preferred the Dark Blonde for filling in larger gaps of missing hair.

The only thing I feel the pencils are missing is a spoolie. Almost all brow pencils now provide a spoolie at the other end, so I feel like it’s a necessary component in a brow pencil now.

The Mary Kay Brow Precision Liners can be purchased on marykay.ca for $16 CAD each or on marykay.com for $14 USD each.

The products featured in this post were sent to me for consideration. Post contains affiliate links.