Stila In The Light Palette

“It’s not Naked but.” Those four words have become synonymous with any makeup palette that features neutral shades. Every brand has an Urban Decay dupe. So here we go again: This is Stila’s In The Light, a product I can now call my very own glitter hooker palette. It seriously shimmers.

Sure, I enjoy a bit of face (or nail) bling like the best beauty addict, but sometimes I feel like when my face shines this much, by the end of the day I look like I have been sobbing big, sparkly unicorn tears. The eye shadow just fell off my face, primer or not, and found its way onto my lashes, cheeks, fingers, cat, etc. The colours simply did not, and would not, adhere to my eyelids. It’s was a friggen’ mess.

So I’ve been attempting to use this particular palette from Stila for quite some time, and it’s also not *exactly* what I would call neutral either – there really are only three lighter shades, the iconic champagne colour in the bunch called Kitten, second from the top left. I found that the individual shadows broke easily. (You’ll “hit pan” before you know it but not from using up product!) The quality is also inconsistent across the colours, the pigments are wishy washy and I hated using the included smudgey eye pencil.

So unless I decide to look like a mermaid for the day, it’s going to take a lot more convincing to prove to me that Stila is worth its price tag… cause this palette certainly is not.

You can buy Stila’s In the Light palette off Kalahari (who knew!) for R435.

Physicians Formula Shimmer Strips Custom Eye Enhancing Eyeliner Trio

Every since Urban Decay came out with their Naked palette, it seems like every beauty brand is bringing out their own range of nude everything and anything. And I’m excited. I don’t wear a lot of colour so I’m all for the dupes, even more so because Urban Decay is not available in South Africa. The last “neutrals” thing I picked up was the Physicians Formula Shimmer Strips Custom Eye Enhancing Eyeliner Trio – a three-pack of shiny pencils in black, brown and copper. These twist-up sticks are ridiculously easy to apply thanks to a gel-like formula. What’s a bit strange, however,  is that each one comes with a teeny tiny built in sharpener at the end. Nice touch… but they’re already quite skinny so why you would need to sharpen them is beyond me. (Makeup for ants?!) If they break, you just twist more up! The colours are deeply pigmented but unfortunately do not last the promised 24 hours. I’ve been wearing them every day for a week and while they do look beautiful on, no matter what you put them on top of (primer, powder, nothing) they tend to fade away. So by 3PM the colour is barely there. They don’t smudge or smear… just disappear.

Physicians Formula products are available from Dischem. The Shimmer Strips Custom Eye Enhancing Eyeliner Trio is R185.