Shadow Swatches: Miscellaneous Eyeshadow Singles and Quads from Stila, L'Oréal, Tom Ford, Butter London, Revlon, and Urban Decay

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I didn't buy anything during the Sephora sale, did you? 20% off just isn't very exciting for me. I mean maybe if there was something I was definitely planning to buy anyway, it would be better to get 20% off than no discount at all, but there wasn't. Plus I have a bunch of Ulta points to use on frivolous shit.

Instead of shopping, lately, I've been playing with what I already have, including these eyeshadows which I realized I'd (mostly) never written about on my blog. Rather than doing a full review of them, I thought I'd just take some swatch photos and say a little about what I like or don't like about each. Not all of them are currently available, but I hope you enjoy the pretty pictures anyway.

The swatches below were made with a brush over primer (Black Radiance eyeshadow primer, reviewed here). If this were a proper review, I would have swatched them with and without primer for your information, but I just really wanted to show you the color and finish clearly. You can still tell which ones are shitty even over primer, anyway.

Oh, and I took way too many photos, which probably all look the same, so here's a cut.

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

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: