Sleek Palettes-- Storm, Original, and Safari

For the last few months I've had these Sleek palettes sitting around waiting to get swatched. I was lucky enough to get a CP of these. Sleek palettes are decently priced palettes available at Superdrug in the UK. I don't actually remember what they retailed for, but I think I paid under $10 each for them. They're all super pigmented and soft.

The Originals palette is a nice, colorful palette full of colors that all work on me for the most part. The colors don't lose to Urban Decay's and I think are actually more vibrant without all the chunky glitter that UD loves putting in. They are all shimmery though except for the black shade.



Sleek Storm is a gorgeous palette capable of creating a variety of neutral or smokey looks.


Safari was a LE palette released over the summer I believe. It's actually my least favorite out of the 3 I own, but only because the colors in it aren't as nice as the other two to me.



I really don't have much to say about these except that they're a good buy for the price. I like them, but they sort of sit around unused in my stash..mostly because I'm a brand whore. My only gripe about them is that there's a black shade in every one of the palettes. I don't need multiples of the same black shadow. Past that, they're great

Diamond Cosmetics Haul and NOTD DC Cherry Tobacco

How's everyone's Thanksgiving weekend going? I got my Diamond Cosmetics order a couple days ago. Diamond Cosmetics is a small brand that carries a small line of polish and makeup online. Their polish retails between $1-$3 with the majority of them being priced at $2. Unfortunately, they didn't package too well and one of the polishes I ordered came beheaded, making a rather huge mess inside the package and 4 polishes not including the broken one stuck to the box. Luckily, they have great CS and they told me that they'd resend my order to me at no cost to me.


These were the ones that easily survived:These were the ones I salvaged after a little more than an hour involving scissors, tweezers, felt, and a lot of nail polish remover.
and here's my NOTD involving Cherry Tobacco. This was after almost 2 days of wear..so there's some dullness and minor tipwear. Please excuse the lint on my nail and the unmanaged cuticles..I've been lazy and the weather is dry. Cherry Tobacco is a really pretty dark brown shade with a lot of deep red shimmer. In sunlight it shines a deep vampy red, while indoors, it is more of a chocolaty color. It's a very nice, unique color imo and well worth the $2 it cost. It's nice and opaque and applies without problems. The formula dries very fast. I used 2 coats

I already changed my mani to Sitka Sable, so you can expect pictures of that tomorrow

Flirt! 40 eyeshadow set

So this is my favorite release this season; the Flirt! Limited Edition 40 eyeshadow set; available at Kohl's for $29.99, but I got it on sale for $23.99 ..though it's currently on sale for $24.99. All 40 colors have great pigmentation, and most of them are soft. Packaging is pretty crappy...all 40 pans sit in a flimsy plastic tray in a cardboard box that closes with a magnet and ties shut with a bright pink ribbon. The plastic tray pops out easily, in case you want to depot the shadows...which I'm considering doing since the packaging is pretty bulky and the clear window seems like it could fall out at any time. I swatched them in columns because it was easier. Natural, slightly cool lighting.







There isn't a whole lot to say about the palette this time except that I really like it and highly recommend them for both your personal collection and as gifts.

Great finds at Ross, TJ Maxx and Rite Aid, OPI Merry Midnight and ORLY Pixie Dust

I went to Ross today and found a couple of great Color Club sets for $7.99 each. I got the Glitter Vixen Set, which contains a set of 7 glitter polishes, and the Dance with the Musique collection.

The colors in the Glitter Vixen Set are:
Sex Symbol- Silver glitter
Magic Attraction- Silver Holographic glitter
Sultry Diva- gold glitter
Art of Seduction- red glitter
Sexy Siren- blue glitter
Object of Envy- green glitter
Tru Passion- lightish purple glitter
All of these colors are basically different colored glitters in a clear base

The colors in the Dance with the Musque set are :
Feel the Beat- shimmery red-orange
Velvet Rope- pink based red with slight gold microshimmer throughout
Slow Jam- maroon, coppery microshimmer
Electronica- blue based purple with violet-pink shimmer throughout. I totally bought this set because of this color alone..though the other colors in the set are nice
Groove Thang- black based purple with purple shimmer
After Hours- Dark grey with silver shimmer throughout
and a clear topcoat

From TJ Maxx I picked up a Barielle Nail brightener for $3.99, which appears to be a sheer white pearlescent polish in the bottle, as well as 2 Essie polishes for $4 each in Looking for Love and Great expectations. Then I went next door to Rite ait where they had these cutte little snowman polishes for the holidays. I picked one up in a gold color with holographic shimmer in it, and amangenta-purple one with lots of holographic glitter in it for $1.99 each.


I also have a couple NOTD swatches for you guys...First up is Today's NOTD which is ORLY Pixie Dust. It's a nice, slightly bluish grey that looks a lot like a creme with a lot of silver microglitter dispersed throughout it. I'm pretty happy with the color and application of this one.
The picture below is a bit warm...The second one was my NOTD from a couple days ago. This one's OPI MErry Midnight, which is a nice dark violet color with a lot of lighter violet flakies in it. This polish is beautiful and no camera comes close to doing this color justice...

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!

Cheap thrills- Sleek Gel Liners

My favorite type of eyeliner is the gel eyeliner, which is why I jumped at the chance when a sweet MUAer offered to CP me these Sleek gel eyeliners from the UK (it's a drugstore brand there) These babies retailed at less than £4 each (about $5) and come in 10 Shades:
- Dominatrix (black)
- Espresso (dark brown)
- Pumpkin (gold)
- Zest (yellow)
- Stone Cold (blue-gray)
- Purple Rain (purple)
- Glacier (white)
- Smitten (light pink)
- Denin (dark blue)
- Wave (light aqua/green)
I chose Stone cold, Denim and Wave to test out. These gel liners are waterproof and are on the drier side, though I adjusted the consistency with some eye drops (see my reviving gel liner tutorial) so that they were wetter and easier to work with. Unlike most gel liners, these have a somewhat unique texture to them.. they're still smudgy when dry..which makes them behave somewhat like a pencil liner for me. (They were like this before the eye drops as well..so the eye drops weren't responsible for this behavior)

Swatches under warm indoor lighting. Stone Cold is more blue on the lids and is a greyish blue...very unique and pretty.

Denim is a shimmery navy blue

Wave is a bright green, and is very pretty on.

Coastal Scents/ Generic palettes from Hong Kong

So I got both of my Coastal Scents/ generic ebay palettes about a week and a half ago (ordered off ebay of course) I got both palettes for a total of about $35 USD. Both palettes retail for $21.95 on Coastal Scents before any applicable taxes and high shipping cost. Bought from what I believe is the source, both palettes only cost about $6 USD each..but since I can't read simplified Chinese, I opted for ebay. It took a week and a half for the palettes to be delivered, and to be honest, I wasn't super impressed with them. Both palettes were encased in super flimsy plastic (it BENDS when you hold it), which kind of turned me off to it.
The 28 piece neutral palette is basically 28 shades that are base shades/nudes and warm browns, with the last shadow being an almost black shade. There isn't a single taupe shade in this palette (shocker!), though there are a couple shades that come close. A lot of the shades are chalky to the touch, although they aplly and blend just fine on the lid. The few shimmer shades in the palettes are softer. The payoff is also quite nice, but if I'd gotten a chance to test it in person before buying it, it's likely that I would have passed on this palette and instead bought something that I would have loved instead of felt somewhat indifferent to. Since I have the palette, I'll probably keep and use it, but it isn't something that would have appealed to me in person. It's one of those things that I feel is worth buying per se (I'd skip it if you already have a large stash), but if you already have it, it's worh keeping..and if you have a small stash and want some neutrals to play with..it's worth considering. Swatches were done in warm indoor lighting, though the colors aren't off by much (my skin is a different story)

The 26 shadow blush combo has less chalky shades than the 28 neutral palette, but more of the shades have shimmer in them. It has a lot of shades that are considerably warmer than the 28 neutral palette, but it also contains a few taupes. Oddly enough, there isn't a whole lot of overlap in the shades between these two palettes, even though they both seemed fairly neutral from their product images (you can probably see the difference in that first pic where I have them lined up next to each other) I prefer the 28 neutral palette to this one since there are more shades in this palette that I would not wear. Swatches of this palette were done under more neutral lighting.

Out of the 5 blushes in this palette, I really would only wear 2. To my fingers, these also felt a bit chalky, though they apply on my skin just fine. The first blush is far too light and doesn't show up on my skin. It's matte, so it doesn't even pass as a highlighter. The second blush is a matte warm dark peach shade. The third blush is a matte rose shade that leans cool. The last two blushes are very similar to two of the eyeshadows in the 3rd row of eyeshadows. The 4th blush is a shimmery red orange, that makes me look orangey sunburned. The plummy blush shade is wearable, but not particularly flattering on me.

I guess overall I'd say these palettes were mediocre. The quality isn't the best, but it's not the worst either. They're both wearable palettes, but to me, the price to quality ratio is precariously balanced. If the palettes were any more expensive than they were, I would not buy them. I was initially interested in these palettes since there were a few people that said that the quality of these palettes was comparable to MAC. It's not. (that or they haven't stuck their fingers in these suckers...though MAC does have a fair amount of duds and chalky shades..so I guess it depends on how you look at it..I'd say that overall MAC is better quality)