November 23, 2009

As promised yesterday, I'm posting pictures of makeup I bought with quick initial thoughts. I will be doing swatches and full reviews of everything I bought as I use these and get a better feeling for the products. Oh, I took all these pics on our drive back from TO, so that's why you can kinda see the car seat in some of them. I had to take the pictures then as it's now too dark by the time I get home from work. I wanted to make this post early this week and not on the weekend.

Ben Nye


As mentioned in my previous post, Ben Nye was selling their products from Malabar as they are the official distributor in Canada. My local Malabar usually has only a few Ben Nye products on hand so it was nice to be able to test more products in person. I ended up getting a huge jar of their translucent setting powder in shade invisible, Final Seal spray as well as Tangerine Lumiere eyeshadow. I wanted to buy the Grand Lumiere palette but let's face it I have the dupes for more than half of the palette so it didn't seem that reasonable. Tangerine is a beautiful orange shimmery colour. I don't have many oranges so I thought this one was a nice addition. I was in need of a setting powder and I got a great deal on the huge jar I got ($16). I also heard great things about Final Seal and I'm hoping it's all I heard and better.

Kryolan


I have wanted to try out Kryolan for ever so this was a great opportunity. I did some research on their website prior to attending IMATS and saw that they have these gorgeous eyeshadow palettes in matte or shimmery finishes. Each palette contains 5 eyeshadows that apply very pigmented. I swatched them all and ended up with the most neutral palette called Cairo. Most of my stash consists on shimmery and bold colours and I needed more matte and neutral colours. Once again, the swatches for this palette will be coming up in the next week or so. I wanted to try out their Eye Dust too but they hadn't brought any to the exhibit.

Makeup Forever


My list for MUFE was not very long as I already have a full palette of MUFE eyeshadow as well as HD and Duo Mat foundations. I wanted to give their Face and Body a shot though so I bought a bottle of that in shade 32. I was told by the MA's that I can wear both 30 and 32 but I should stick with 32 as 30 might be too light in the summer. I also bought eyeshadow refills in #75 and #83. I will be swatching the eyeshadow with the rest of my MUFE colour collection soon. MUFE offered 40% of their retail price and as a result their counter was extremly busy.

Naked Cosmetics


Naked comstics makes beautiful pure pigments with no fillers. Their pigments come in stalks of 6 mini pigments organized by collections based on a theme colour. I picked up the Ebony and Ivory collections (haha!). Ebony reminds me of MAC Style Black in terms of the darkness and glitteriness of the pigments. There's dark blue, dark purple, black with silver glitter, dark green and dark burgundy. The ivory set has 6 nude pigments that have various duochrome effects like reflections of pale yellow, pink, lavender, blue and green. I love these two sets. I took me a while to decide which sets I wanted though as they were all gorgeous. These sets were $30 each or two for $50. This is the purchase I'm the most excited about. I cannot wait to play with these babies!

Obsessive Compulsive Cosmetics


I already have a few of the OCC pigments and quite like them so I was excited to try out more and also test the lip tars. To my disappointment, they didn't have any of the pure colour pigments. But I did get some regular pigments (Lafayette and Clove) and two of the lip tars (Pageant and Plum) and a nail polish (Something). The lip tar packaging is much smaller than I expected but they are insanely pigmented! I wanted to get more of the tars but honestly I'm a little lazy with mixing lip products so I got only the two. I love Lafayette pigment as it's the exact colour of my eyes. I have a weakness of taupe eyeshadows and anything blue, hence the purchase of Clove p/m and Something nail polish.

Crown Brushes


The price of these brushes was amazing. I wanted to buy one of each brush! The selection is very sizable so it took a while again to come up with a decision. As I'm pretty happy with my MAC brushes, so I bought a few of these to compliment my existing stash. I purchased a shading brush, a 242 lookalike (I cannot find my 242 half the time I'm doing my makeup), a fluffy 217 lookalike (this one I will give to my mom) and a less fluffy two ended brush (concealer/lip brush). The price range for these was between $2 - $5.

Royal Brushes



As per above, I also picked up some brushes from Royal brush. I purchased a mini angled kabuki brush. This brush is so soft and efficient (I used it this morning to apply powder). I also got a bent eyeliner brush, and angled shading brush like the 272 and a fluffy angled blending brush. The price range for these was between $2 - $7.

Pari Professional


I purchased bottle of brush cleaner from these guys as they had excellent reviews online and I had grown tired of the old school shampooing method of brush cleaning. They demonstrated the method to me before purchase. You spray some product into a paper towel, dip the dirty brush in and make some quick circles, wait about a minute for it to dry, et voila! This should make life so much easier for me.

Nars


Nars was not actually having a discount sale but I wanted the Sex Machine Velvet Matte pencil for a while so I thought I might as well pick it up at IMATS. I had tried this shade on at Sephora before and loved the texture and the feel of it on my lips. I also wanted Dragon Girl and Dolce Vita but I will go back to Sephora for those at a later time.

Ok, that's all for my IMATS haul. Full review and swatches are still upcoming starting this weekend. Hope you guys enjoyed my rambling :)