Thrifty Thursday: L'Oreal Infallibles

L'Oreal Infallible eyeshadows are my current Western-drugstore eyeshadow formulation darlings. They are a loosely packed-rather-than-pressed powder eyeshadow in a little jar. Most are astonishingly well pigmented and look luxe. Because they can be quite shiny and also not always easy to blend, I prefer them as accent lid colors (rather than in the crease or on browbone.) Most often, I'll apply a blendable base color over my lid and into my crease and tap the Infallible on as a topper. I'll do a neutral eye and then dot, say, Golden Sage in the middle of my lid. Another technique is to apply Bronzed Taupe all over my lid and spend a bit of time buffing it into the crease. I also have been known to use Smoldering Plum as an eyeliner. Glorious.

These pictures are all taken with flash.

Strawberry Blonde and Dive Right In are limited edition for Summer 2013 in the U.S., along with some fabulous jelly nail polishes.

So shiny.

The hardest Infallible to capture is Smoldering Plum. In contrast with Golden Emerald, the most glittery Infallible I currently own, Smoldering Plum has almost a microshimmered quality, with an abundance of tiny pink flecks which make the color seem rosier in person. 

I love L'Oreal for these and that they consistently put out new ones (though they are annoyingly LE.)

Tone It Down Taupe!

Here, have some taupe swatches. 

It is with the most mixed of emotions that I face today, Autism Awareness Day. On the one hand, there are lots of kind people out there who are changing their profile picture on Facebook and posting about autism awareness because they really do care about the autistic people they know. On the other hand, I'm seeing a lot of puzzle pieces and Autism Speaks icons and wristbands, and many of the autistic people I know find that representation hurtful. (Here's why.) (More why.)

Awareness is the first step, but it doesn't end there. Here's hoping that we can move from awareness to acceptance this month.

Recently, I saw an idea that I absolutely loved instantly. Tone It Down Taupe is a movement to raise awareness of those lacking autism in a way that turns alarmist rhetoric on its head. It's tongue-in-cheek but the message is important: fear rhetoric hurts real people. Neither allistic (non-autistic) or autistic people want to be cured. We want care and support and the tools to navigate through life, making healthy, meaningful connections with people.

So, in honor of Tone It Down Taupe, I'm sure I'll be doing a lot of taupe EOTDs this month. I have used much less significant excuses to wear more taupe and this way I can keep y'all informed about the cool stuff I'm finding out about effective advocacy for autistic people and ways to support them!

This is a beauty blog, after all, so have some more taupe swatches!

Going through the Taupes: Kate Dual Blend Eyes in BK-1

 One of the cool things about going through my taupes is rediscovering some that I had forgotten about (as well as finding ones I could go without; Bloom Slate, a murky grey, went straight to the purge pile after I swatched.) KATE Dual Blend Eyes in BK-1 was a pleasant rediscovery.

It has two shades: a puttyish beige and a deep cool brown with a bit of a violet undertone.

The selling point is that the two eyeshadow colors aren't completely separated and can be blended in the pan. I tried to clean up the beige side for you (aren't I nice?) but with normal usage, the area in the middle can become quite muddled.

Dark brown, beige, blended

Once the beige is layered over the cool brown, the effect becomes even more muted, even taupe-y. For consistency's sake, I like to take pictures in natural light. I had none, so these are all with-flash, which does have the benefit of showing off the shimmer.

I know I said that most KATE palettes tended to have one shade I don't like. There's generally a glitter stripe I delicately try to avoid or a useless creasy cream base. But here, both shades are smooth with buildable pigmentation. They're not the most densely pigmented in the world but they're also not sheer.

I wanted to show you how similar the Lunasol and KATE shimmer stories are. Again, with my lack of light box, voodoo powers, or ridiculous macro lens, the subtle yumminess of the shimmer (especially in the case of the Lunasol quad) is hard to see. But what I hope you can see is that they are similar in finish and even in their soft texture. Both of these palettes are my favorites from the respective brands, formula-wise, by the way. If you are looking into KATE, the Dual Blend eyes are a pretty nice place to start.

And here is the blended shade swatched along with some other taupes in a picture that dulls the shimmer considerably, as anyone who has ever owned Bronzed Taupe can guess.

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.