Category: makeup

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Gold Trench No. 4

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For an effortless, sheer shadow with low-level sophisticated shimmer, look to the Burberry Sheer Eyeshadows. The Burberry makeup line is nice across the board, great formulations for lips, base, eyes, face, but for the most part I think it’s too expensive to be truly tempting, and their colors are overwhelmingly neutral. If I am up for the Burberry price tag, I go to Chanel (blush, lipstick), Dior (eyeshadow), or Guerlain (bronzer), where the options are iconic, proven, and where I’ve made happy choices in the past.

That said, these eyeshadows are really so nice. They are not highly pigmented (one popular way of determining the quality of a shadow) but we do not hold this against them as it is not their purpose. Their purpose is to be uniformly pigmented and slightly creamy in texture (imagine the texture of a Dior shadow with half the pigmentation) such that they give a foolproof wash of color that is ideal for a polished, understated look. Their colors are virtually all shades of beige and brown, and they are lovely.

I plumped for the shade Gold Trench #4, a beautiful pale gold (I wish this were the color of my trench coat). As if I needed yet another gold eyeshadow. I also like Pale Barley (silvery taupe) and Midnight Brown (chocolate brown). Great for an easy single shadow look.

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worth it: wet n wild balmstain

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Imagine my astonishment when I tried this $3 lip crayon (a meet-the-shipping-minimum gamble) and absolutely loved it. Slick, gel texture, uniform pigmentation but not so opaque as to be any kind of trouble, any kind of fuss, nice gloss level (not too high), moisturizing (not amazing but it’s not a farce to call it a balm, as with some we could mention), no strange smell…really kind of surprisingly great, and especially great for $3. This color, officially the Wet n Wild MegaSlicks Balm Stain Moisturizing Lip Color in Red-Dy or Not, is lovely, too. A warm rosy red that comes up a little more terracotta on me than it seems in the stick.

I’m often throwing on whatever lip thing in the morning and investigating later on, how it’s going, and this one was impressively present, still, a few hours in. I kind of made a face in the mirror, like, what are you still doing here?! It’s not like it doesn’t wipe off on things like your coffee cup, it does, there’s just somehow still some left on your lips for a good long while. I think it might actually stain a little! [Research not yet conclusive] Like no lip stain ever seems to be able to do.* And the cap clicks on pretty well! And hasn’t fallen off on me. YMMV but this ticked a lot of boxes for me.

*Work on this technology, industry, this is a gold mine.

Upshot: there are much worse things you could do with $3. On top of which they’re bound to go on sale sometime soon in a pharmacy near you. I may try some of the other colors.