I have been meaning to do this review/blog for ages! Finally, I am getting around to it. I got this starter kit around Christmas time from makeupgeek.com. For those of you who are not up on your makeup gurus, this site is run by Marlena and her team who do makeup tutorials, product reviews and the like. I personally love her website and her tutorials. At the end of last year, Marlena launched her own line of eyeshadows. She has over 50 colours at the moment and they are gorgeous! They are $5.99 U.S. each and shipping to Canada is very minimal. Whenever I have purchased something from them, the cost is only a few dollars to Canada and the products arrive pretty fast. I have made a number of purchases from that site over the last couple of years and plan to do some more for sure.
The cost of the starter kit was $45 U.S. You get 8 eyeshadows which Marlena has pre-selected for the set. Each eyeshadow is 1.8g. MAC's eyeshadows are 1.5g to put that in perspective for you. The Z palette which my eyeshadows are in above does not come with the starter kit. The price of this size of Z palette was $13.99 from the Makeup Geek store. There are other colours if you are not into zebra. You can also get larger Z palettes from the site for $18.99 and $27.99. I personally like the small palette, but the larger ones are a better overall deal. When I first saw the Z palettes online, I thought that they looked cheap and lame compared to the MAC palettes. I own a couple of the 15 eyeshadow MAC palettes and a few MAC eyeshadow quad palettes. I don't feel safe travelling with the MAC 15 eyeshadow palettes. I feel pretty safe travelling with the MAC quads. The Z palette is actually a lot more sturdy than I expected. I would feel safe travelling with the 9 spot Z palette. The clear plastic top is very hard and the rest of it is really solid and tough. You can also mix and match eyeshadows to put in it from MAC and Makeup Geek or whatever brand too if you like. The bottom of the Z palette is magnetic so that the eyeshadow pans stay put.
Back to the eyeshadows. The swatch colours are left to right and row by row for the palette above is as follows: Shimma Shimma, Purely Naked, Glamorous, Unexpected, Cocoa Bear, Mocha, Purple Rain and Corrupt. My favourite is Unexpected hands down. This is a great crease colour when you don't want brown and is great for us cooler skinned gals. I keep staring at it in the mirror when I wear it. I like to wear it with MAC's Shroom. I have not tried these eyeshadows without a primer, so I can not speak to whether they crease or not. I would imagine they do since they are not marketed as creaseless. My least favourite is Shimma Shimma. I am sure someone will tell me that I mad for saying that. It looks terrible on the lid, or at least it does on my lid, because it looks too thick and cakey on the lid for some reason and in the inner corner/tear duct area. It looks great as a brow highlight though! I wish there had been a neutral lid colour in this starter set to pull it all together. I think the idea was for Purely Naked to be that lid colour, but on me its too dark for that purpose. I like Purely Naked to warm up the brow bone and blend out the crease colour. It's kind of like a quasi dupe of MAC's Soft Brown or Tete a Tint.
The colour that shocked me the most in a bizarre way was Glamorous. It looks gold in the pan and on the Makeup Geek website. On me, it is orange! Flaming Fall Leaf orange. I don't wear a lot of that type of colour, but I found it interesting on and I will certainly be experimenting with it in the future. It is surprisingly flattering and I think a lot of different skin colours could pull it off. Cocoa Bear reminds me of a bit of a dupe for MAC's Folie. It works well in the crease with Glamorous on the lid. Mocha and Purple Rain are the least pigmented of these colours in my opinion. That being said, all of these colours are highly pigmented. When I say Mocha and Purple Rain are the least pigmented, it just means that they are still decently pigmented, just not as much so as the others. I have never seen a black like Corrupt before. This is hit me in the eye BLACK. If you are looking for a black eyeshadow with crazy payoff, look no further. I did have minor fall out with Corrupt but nothing major.
These are all high quality eyeshadows that could seriously pass for high end eyeshadows. The list of ingredients is very short and there is nothing scary on the list. For $5.99 each, there is nothing on the market in my mind that can compare. These eyeshadows are a steal for what you get. You could only buy 3 MAC eyeshadows for the price of this starter kit. I still love my MAC eyeshadows, don't get me wrong, I will still be purchasing those with gusto. It looks like there is a new kid in town though. I checked out the online reviews of these eyeshadows before I made the purchase and I only heard positive reviews. I think it would have been more beneficial for me to have been able to pick the 8 colours in the starter set for my own purposes, but I can see why Marlena chose the ones that she did. I have my eye on Country Girl, Mermaid, Duchess, Poolside, Sea Mist and Razzleberry myself. You should check them out.
Rating: 9/10
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