I have been curious about the Cover Girl Eye Brightening Shadow Palettes ever since they were first advertised. I believe this was the first of its kind to catch my attention and I finally picked one up to try it a few weeks ago.
I admit that when it comes to enhancing the eyes I am very much a traditionalist, and I'm also on the conservative side when it comes to the colour I use on the eyes. I tend to stick to the colour wheel as it is a no-brainer that contrasting colours make each other pop. For this reason I've always stuck with warm red-browns (my favourite eyeshadow BY FAR for making my eyes pop is MAC's Satin Taupe), rusty oranges and deep blues and teals to enhance my baby blues. This palette would not be what I picked up normally with its bright, frosty blue, green and soft peach colour palette but I was interested in how these shades might make my eyes pop (rather than my suspicion that they'd compete).
Instructions on back of exterior packaging.
Instructions on back of palette
This palette offers fairly detailed instructions on how to apply the colours, on both the exterior packaging (in colour!) and on the back of the palette itself. It also comes with a small-sized brush for application as well as the standard (and pretty useless) sponge tip applicator.
Swatched
As you can see, the blue and green shades swatched fairly intensely while it took some effort to get the peachy shade to show up on my hand as more than shimmer. The lightest (highlight) shade shows up as a slightly warm off-white vanilla colour.
I followed the instructions on the packaging and used both the brush and sponge-tip applicator, though I admit I used some of my own brushes to better control the colours and blend a bit more.
I had trouble getting any intensity from these shadows. It seemed to be all about the shimmer and frostiness and while there's nothing wrong with that, why do I need four shades of such low pigmentation? There's just not much ability to build and deepen the shades at all. That being siad, I liked the shades themselves (particularly the blue smudged along my lashline) and will use them again, just not in this look.
As for how well they made my eye colour pop, I didn't see that they did much to emphasize or enhance the colour. If anything, I think the shimmer and colour compete with my eye colour.
What do you think? Has anyone tried the Eye Brightening Palette and loved it?
C.