Wednesday, March 6, 2013

But my eyes are already three-dimensional...

 I don't know if it's bad juju to start with a "meh" review.

But here we have Lunasol's Three-Dimensional quad... or octet... depending on how you look at it, and I wouldn't keep it with me in my pyramid for use in the Egyptian afterlife, but I find it useful.

On the outside, it looks like this:
Cheekily reflective.
On the inside, it looks like this:

It boasts an eggshell, a lilac, a beige, and a dark cool brown color.

What may be hard to see is that the eggshell and the deep cool brown have three separate finishes in their respective pans: a satin, a slight shimmer (that looks much the same as the satin), and a sparse gold glitter that is not really ostentatious once applied. One can theoretically use these shades separately or blended together. I find that the three-in-one pans look pretty homogeneous in reality.

The beige and the lilac are both shimmery but not frosty, with that translucence and refinement and multicolored microshimmer seen in many Japanese eyeshadow formulations. They feel pretty silky and nice to the touch. Not too dry. But not buttery, either.

With my nekkid eye, I see lime, pink, and baby blue microshimmer that unfortunately does not translate here.

Simplistically swatched with the tri-shades blended together. Oh, hello, vein.
It is quite pretty. I think it shows why I was drawn to the color story. To the far right, you can see how the four colors layer to make a purply taupe. I love a good murky purply taupe.

This Lunasol palette is the only one I own. In my opinion, the contrasting microshimmer particles I mentioned provide the major difference between this Lunasol palette and sister-in-Kanebo line KATE palettes. The KATE palettes I own, as you may see in forthcoming posts, tend to have less interesting color combinations of microshimmer and they also usually have at least one gritty or somehow texturally subpar shade.

Given that you probably can't see the complexities of the microshimmer here unless you have amazing alien eyeballs, you might correctly ascertain that I don't think the differences between Lunasol and KATE palettes are at all massive enough to justify Lunasol's significantly higher price. They tend to offer really similar shades each season and I've, for the most part, stuck to KATE's eyeshadows.

Now, blushes are another story altogether, but that is for a later day.

2 comments:

  1. So I bought this and then recently purged it. I'm not sure why I didn't enjoy it that much. I think by itself that lavender is very feminine and pretty, but in the palette combination and on my eyes, it didn't do very much for me!

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    1. I really don't know how people-who-are-not-paper-faced-me-or-Kate wear this. I can see the translucency of the beige being really hard to work with for most people. But the lavender is pretty.

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