I Heart Duochromes: Eyeshadow Edition

Disclosure: Affiliate links.

(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.)