NYX Single e/s Swatches..Quality Control anyone?

NYX has generally surprised me over the years with the high quality of their shadows in combination with their low prices. The eyeshadows, most especially the single colors, are smooth, pigmented, and blend very well. I've bought quite a few of them along the way, but these are the ones I've kept.Sparkle Cedar-a nice taupe with a lot of sparkle to it. It appears to me to have a slight hint of green to it while still remaining on the cooler side of the spectrum.
Taupe Pearl-named quite literally. It's a taupe eyeshadow with a pearl finish. It's nice, but not horribly unique to me in any way. I'm not really complaining for $5 though
Iced Mocha- one of my oldest NYX singles; it's a bit warmer than Taupe Pearl, but the two are fairly similar.
The last two swatches of this set are both NYX Root Beer-both were bought at different times from different places, but both have the same name and look very different from each other. The first one, has a considerable amount more purple tones to it and is a lighter taupey color. The second is a richer brown-taupe with a hint of pruple, but it's a much less strong purple tone than the other one. I had bought the second one after depotting the first one and being left with regret. However, I discovered after coming home with it that the two colors were not identical; and therefore felt the need to keep both. Seeing the two of these next to each other, I can see why people have argued about whether or not NYX Root Beer is considered a dupe for the elusive MAC Moth Brown. (I'd say one of the versions is probably close)..which I suppose leads me to my title question; Quality Control anyone? It's a bit silly to have shades that are so inconsistent among batches..

Skin Tight-a light warm peachy skintone like shade with golden peach sparkle. This is pretty without lending too much color on my eyes.
Champagne-the color apples turn when they start oxidizing...only shimmery. I don't feel like Champagne is a real Champagne color, but it's still a nice color.
Flamingo- a nice, dirty pink/gold duochromish shadow. I like this shade quite a bit, but I find it harder and more difficult to work with than the rest of my NYX.
Deep Bronze-the name fits the shade on this one. I don't have a whole lot to say on it
Silver-a nice silver shade without too many blue tones.

Khaki- a pretty green shade with a hint of grey
Herb- a warm bronzed green
Green Tea- I kinda like this shade..it's a dirty seafoam greem type of color with a silvery pearl to it...just beautiful
Hunter green- a deeper green-grey shade
Charcoal-gunmetal grey

NYX Palettes--Part 1

For those of you who frequent the boards on MUA, you might already know that I am definitely a high end hoor,when it comes to my makeup (It's a good thing this obsession doesn't extend to my clothing and accessories or I'd really be in trouble) However, one of the few drug store or low end brands I'll use is NYX. They're a great affordable brand with products that in my opinion, competes beautifully with every mid end and high end brand out there. If you hang out on the boards, you'd also know that I'm a huge palette hoor. Unluckily (or Luckily, however you like to look at it) for me, NYX recently came out with 20 new palettes (which contain either 5 colors or 10 colors) I missed the big blowout sale NYX had of these when they first released these, and had subsequently decided to pass on them, but when nonpareilboutique had their sale over the 4th of July weekend, I caved and picked the 6 palettes I wanted the most out of the lot, and I was absolutely delighted to receive them in the mail.

The quality of each palette is excellent and all of the colors in these palettes have decent pigmentation and blendability. There are a few colors that are a bit chalky (mostly the black or near black colors..which I hardly ever use so it's perfectly fine), but for the most part I love these palettes and have absolutely no regret in ordering them. I ordered 5 of the 10 color palettes; Mysterious Brown Eyes, Versus, Romance, Smokey Eyes, and Champagne and Caviar, and one of the 5 color palettes; I Dream of Barbados.

Mysterious Brown eyes is NYX's palette designed to complement, you guessed it, brown eyes. It is a mostly neutral colored palettes with a couple of purples and a green in it. Out of the 6 palettes I ordered, this is the only one I've tried on my face so far (I just started working for real and the 8.5 hour day plus 2 hour total commute has left me too wiped to play, and it takes too much effort in the morning to drag myself out of bed in the morning to leave myself time to properly apply eye makeup) Most of the colors in this palette are quite smooth, but the lilac color on the top right does feel a bit chalky. However, with a MAC 139, this color applies rather pigmented and blends just fine with the other colors in the palette.
Versus is a great little palette with neutrals and purples. It's not as buttery as most NYX singles are, but I wouldn't say it was chalky either. The shadows in here are drier in texture than many of my NYX singles, but there is asolutely no problem pulling color off of it. I'm not really sure what brand I could compare the texture to, but I'd say it's similar to some NARS's creamier shadows, but not as dry as other NARS shadows. (Does this make ANY sense?)

After I swateched the Versus palette, I thankfully decided to give up trying to swatch all 10 shades in a palette at once on my arm.

Romance is a nice warm, somewhat neutrally palette. The texture of this palette is absolutely wonderful, and I'd probably go as far to say that it is the most buttery palette in the lot of 10 color palettes I ordered. The second Row in particular is very buttery and pigmented.


The Smokey Eyes palette is probably the sexiest smokey eye palette I've seen around. It gives a nice variety of colors to use for a classic smokey eye, which is nice, because I think that 4 color smokey eye palettes, while nice, get a little boring. This palette gives you a nice chance to play with several shades of colors to create both a warm and cool toned smokey eye. The quality of this one is generally excellent, but the first color from the left on the bottom row is chalky (It's the black color though, so who cares really). IT'd apply just fine as a liner though I think.


Probably the sexiest palette to look at is Champagne and Caviar. Champagne and Caviar is a great palette of neutral colors. Additionally, the colors in this palette are not super shimmery, so this palette is perfect for work. The texture leaves me with nothing to complain about either.


Last, but not least, is I Dream of Barbados. This is a really nice cool toned palette with purples, greys, and a pink. This is a really cute palette that actually seems to resemble Dior's Fall quint; Night Butterfly. It does have a few differences though, which I will discuss later when I post swatches of what I got from Dior's Fall collection. The texture of this palette is even better than the 10 color palettes and I think that the quality of the shadows in this palette match the quality of NYX's really nice single shadows perfectly. Each of the shadows in this palette are about 1" in diameter and are the same size as MAC shadows, so if you chose, you coud depot these colors and place them in a MAC palette (Which seems a bit pointless to me, but some people like that)

Anyways, for those of you wondering why the title of this entry was "Part 1", I actually intend to order the rest of the NYX palettes and swatch every last one of them for you guys, so please look forward to that. Additionally, I'd like to say that I'm not quite done posting all my Stila stuff (or Bobbi Brown for that matter) , so look forward to that. If I don't update my blog for a while, there's still a decent chance that I may still be swatching. For those who want to browse some of the swatched I may have but have not posted on here, you can go ahead and check out the photos of the MUA user 'stashswatch'. That's the username I'll be using to share my swatches on the boards. Additionally, I haul in a rather OCD manner. If you see any of my haul posts (usually under my main handle 'eternalstarangel' aka ESA) and decide that you'd like to see something swatched, feel free and shoot me a message. Thanks for stopping in and have a nice day!