I Heart Duochromes: Eyeshadow Edition

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(From top left: e.l.f. Baked Eyeshadow in Enchanted, Wet N Wild Comfort Zone palette, Maybelline Color Tattoo in Seashore Frosts, Makeup Geek Ritzy, Makeup Geek Typhoon, Prestige Total Intensity eyeshadow in Bewitched, Urban Decay Fireball, City Color Mousse in White Gold, and Blend Mineral Cosmetics PIG3.)

I have documented my love for shifty pigments before, such as in my Color Club Oil Slicks post. (Those were actually multichromes, not duochromes, as are a few of the eyeshadows here.) I love duochrome everything just because it's so damned beautiful--but duochrome eyeshadows have the additional benefit of being great for quick and lazy eye looks. The way the color changes depending how the light hits it means that I can blend a single eyeshadow from my lash line into my crease, and it will look like I put in more work than I did. (This works with some non-duochrome shimmer eyeshadows, too, like Maybelline Bad to the Bronze, reviewed here.)

I originally planned to post this round-up of all my duochrome eyeshadows a couple of years ago, but I had such a hard time photographing the Maybelline Color Tattoo in Seashore Frosts that I set the whole project aside for a long time. I've decided to just go ahead and post the photos I have anyway, because enough already! I'm not a perfectionist. The complexity of the paler multi- and duochromes was very difficult (for me, at least) to capture in a photo. All of these eyeshadows really need to be seen in person to be fully appreciated. Anyway, by now I have several more shades to share, so maybe the wait was worth it!

None of my duochromes, with the exception of the LE Color Tattoo, are especially obscure. I know that indie cosmetics makers offer a lot of other options, but I still haven't got too far into indie makeup (a single Makeup Geek order and a Life's Entropy order aside). My hesitancy is in part because I don't have the patience to stalk things that are put out in small batches, and I am also not confident that I can tell which indie companies are reliable and which aren't. Nevertheless, if you want to collect all the duochromes, indies are probably the way to go.

The rest of this post consists mainly of photos (so many photos of eyeballs)--it's not meant as a review. More of a celebration. For that reason, I've swatched all of these eyeshadows over primer, with my finger, which is a technique I've criticized recently because it can make powder products look smoother and more pigmented than they really are. I'm trying to show the color shift as clearly as possible, rather than to compare the performance of each eyeshadow. But if you have questions about any of them, please feel free to ask!

Swatches! I only got the little sample pan of Urban Decay Fireball after I had photographed the other swatches, so it's pictured separately.

Left to right: Wet N Wild Comfort Zone, Prestige Total Intensity eyeshadow in Bewitched, Makeup Geek Ritzy, Makeup Geek Typhoon, Maybelline Color Tattoo in Seashore Frosts, Blend Mineral Cosmetics PIG3, City Color Mousse in White Gold, and e.l.f. Baked Eyeshadow in Enchanted.

Urban Decay Fireball

Swatches and review of Makeup Geek eyeshadows: Fairytale, Time Travel, Typhoon, and Ritzy

Disclosure: Affiliate links.

Top to bottom: Makeup Geek Fairytale, Time Travel, Typhoon, and Ritzy

I originally ordered these four shadows from Makeup Geek after looking for a dupe for the terrible Maybelline Color Tattoo in Vintage Plum (reviewed here). From swatches I found online, Mac's Dove Feather looked similar, but it's been discontinued. But Makeup Geek's Fairytale is apparently a dupe for Dove Feather, and I couldn't order just one and holy shit duochromes and here we are. I bought individual pans of four shades ($6 each + $2 shipping): Ritzy, Typhoon, Fairytale, and Time Travel, which came in little cardboard sleeves, and I eventually put them all into this magnetic palette I picked up with my Choix points. I ordered the eyeshadow on March 18, got a shipping notice March 24, and the package was delivered March 28--just to give you an idea of how long things took, since indie cosmetics can be slow. Not bad at all. (I know that there has been some drama involving Makeup Geek, as there tends to be with all personality-driven makeup brands. You can google if you are so inclined. So far as I can tell, there have been no instances of hate speech, so I'm going to stick to reviewing the products themselves here.)

I'm going to show arm swatches of all four shadows, as well as photos of how they look on my eyelids. I swatched them on my arm with a good brush and without primer. The photos of the eyeshadows on my eyelid are over primer, because I have such oily lids that I never wear eyeshadow without primer. For each shade, I packed it on to my lid with a brush and then blended it up and out, into the crease and above. This is not necessarily how I would normally wear all of these shades, but it provides a consistent comparison. I also used a highlight shade on my browbone.

(I'll give you a cut here so you don't have to load a bunch of giant photos of my eyeballs if you don't want to.)

And now I can die: Color Club Oil Slick multichrome nail polish swatches (with excessive photos)

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I felt like I was pretty much over nail polish after amassing a ridiculously large hoard and then purging dozens of bottles from it and not being able to find anyone to take them off my hands (pun intended?). The rejects are still sitting in a box in my closet taking up space. Anyone want them?

But then I saw photos of the Color Club Oil Slick Collection on beautygeeks, and my acquisitive drive fired right the fuck back up. Multichromes are my absolute favorites, and these ones looked as stunning as the many indie options out there, but more accessible. I've just never really got into indie polishes. There's definitely some fascinating stuff out there, but the prices and (often) the need to pounce before things go out of stock just don't appeal to me. ILNP, for instance, has dozens of multichromes - but the choice is overwhelming, and they are more expensive than Color Club. I've used and liked Color Club before, and I really hoped I would be able to find these polishes at Meijer, where I once got some of the Halo Hues (holos) for under $4. No such luck, of course.

Color Club Oil Slick collection: Cash Only, It's Raining Men, We'll Never Be Royals, and Burnt Out

I'm not impulsive. I told myself that I wasn't allowed to buy them until I could redeem 200 coins in Habitica. In the meantime, I wanted to find the cheapest possible price online. I only wanted four from the collection: Cash Only, It's Raining Men, We'll Never Be Royals, and Burnt Out. You can find them on ebay, and I'd heard that some people had picked them up there for about $6 each + free shipping. I checked several times over the course of a few weeks and never found anything lower that $8 + $3-4 shipping per bottle. Amazon's prices fluctuate, but over the weeks I was looking, they didn't go lower than ebay. I looked at several other beauty and nail supply sites, but when Color Club had a 31% off sale on their site for Halloween, I ended up getting them there for a total of about $33 including shipping for the four bottles. If you want a few bottles, I'd recommend getting them from the Color Club site, if you don't mind waiting for a sale (right now they have 25% off), though if you just want a single bottle, $10 + free shipping on Amazon is probably a better bet.

Color Club Oil Slick collection: Cash Only, It's Raining Men, We'll Never Be Royals, and Burnt Out

Anyway, enough shop(ping) talk. I have them now and they are nearly everything I imagined and we are very happy together. Some general points about the formula of all of them, and then I'll move on to photos. They are nice and opaque, so you only need two coats. If you're very good, you might be able to get away with just one coat. But all four of these polishes are quite thick, so I anticipate having to thin them sooner rather than later. That also means that you have to wipe the brush off carefully or you might end up with a big glob rolling down the wand as you're painting your nail and messing everything up. Dry time is average, but I always use a quick dry top coat, because I am not at all patient enough not to. I used Orly Polishield (reviewed here, but I've found recently that I like it much better when I use a thick coat of it) for all the photos below. I applied Cash Only without a basecoat and it chipped the next day. For all the others, I used Orly Bonder basecoat and went at least two days without chipping (it's rare that any polish lasts much longer than that for me).

So let's get on with the swatches. It's impossible to capture all the shifting colors in photos, because it's really movement that brings them alive. I did my best with my mediocre camera. I exercised almost no restraint, so I've put many, many photos below the cut. Indulge me! I haven't been this excited about nail polish in a long time.

First up: Cash Only. This was a surprise. I hesitated about getting it, but it turned out to be my second favorite of the bunch. It's really amazing and not like anything else I've seen. It would be hard to name all the colors in there. It goes from rosy beige, to gold, to steel grey, to silver, to lavender, to blue, to green, with a bunch of other shit in between.

The photos below are in all sorts of different lighting, and let me warn you one last time that I went overboard with the number of photos here (you can enlarge them by clicking on them). But they're all different! All equally important.

Quickie Swatches: Sephora+Pantone Universe Spectral Lacquer in Waterfall

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I hope this isn't super fucking annoying, because this polish seems to be sold out on the Sephora website at the moment. However, over the couple of days I was putting my order together late last week, different colors kept disappearing and reappearing, so I hope it'll be back. I got lucky. Keep checking the Sephora sale section, because it's worth it. I got it on sale for $5, and it's way prettier in person than in photos (especially my sad indoor/evening ones). I think they give you an idea of the range of colors in this multichrome, though, as well as all the sparkle. I'd read some reviews of Waterfall that weren't glowing, but I got it opaque in 3 thin coats, and it looks spectacular.

If it doesn't reappear online, it's certainly worth looking for in store.

Here are my photos:

You Claws: Chanel Peridot dupes

So it seems like every fucking nail polish line in existence has a dupe (or near-dupe) for the gorgeous Chanel Peridot that came out in Fall 2011. (Check it out at The Swatchaholic.)

For example:

• Jessica Iridescent Eye


• Nicole by OPI Mer-maid for Each Other


• China Glaze Unpredictable


• Color Club Editorial


• OPI Just Spotted the Lizard


• more?

I still haven’t got my covetous little hands on one of these. Have any of you got one? What do you think? What is the best (in terms of formula and color-changing)? I get the impression that the OPI and Jessica polishes are closest to the Chanel, but I guess that doesn’t mean they are necessarily the best. Anyway, I think the Chanel cost around $24, and these are all more like $4-8, so if you don’t care about being a season behind (I really don’t - I just want to look at pretty colors), then you have lots of options.