Estee Lauder Blue Dahlia

Impetuous, spontaneous, foolhardy.  Mrs Instant Gratification, that's me.  Decide at 7pm on a Wednesday evening that I am a Bright Spring who should only ever wear teal and by lunch time on Thursday I have spent £35 on blue eye shadow and had my hair colour darkened as I have decided, based on nothing at all, that it will look much better with my new colourful wardrobe.  For once my leaping in seems not to have back fired.  

Having decided that I needed colour I spent a considerable time online googling the various options, no point wanting anything from Guerlain or Laura Mercier as neither of those are available in Huddersfield.  Clarins is nice but safe, maybe? Lancome was a possibility but knowing that I love Estee Lauder DWL and having seen that the eye palettes were both beautiful and, comparatively, affordable I created a bit of a yearning for an Estee Lauder palette and given my new found love of colour the only one that was ever going to tick all the boxes was Blue Dahlia.

It wasn't until I got to Huddersfield I thought to consider that perhaps it was no longer available, given that it first appeared ages ago as part of a limited edition.  Luckily I needn't have worried, apparently it was limited ed but proved so popular its now part of the main collection.  Wanna see some pics?!

 

The familiar iconic EL gold case which feels nicely weighty.

I am sure everyone has seen this a million times so these photos are completely self-indulgent.  I fell in love with the teal and the shimmering navy but it's the taupe that pulls everything together and makes it all so wearable if you are a bit colour shy.

 The white isn't white, it is an opalescent shimmer, no frost, no whiteness, just the most beautiful opal glitter.  Not immensely wearable admittedly but to add a little something to an evening eye it's perfect.

The photo above best shows the glitter, especially if you click on it to see the larger photo. 

As you would imagine the colours are a dream to apply.  I very unusually have a morning where I haven't had to get up to do breakfast for guests so I had the chance to play.  Ordinarily for the day I suspect I'd go taupe all over the lid and then use either the teal or the navy on my upper lash line and I would always intend to go all out and use the colour properly on a night out and then would chicken out and never do it.  This morning I decided that if I was going to spend £35 on coloured eye shadow I wasn't going to shy away from using it.

A bit much for Co-op in Elland on a Saturday morning I'll grant you, but I do love it!  I had read that the Estee Lauder way to wear was the teal all over the mobile lid, taupe in the crease and the navy on the outer corner and top and bottom lash line, or something along those lines so that's what I did.  I still have slightly puffy eye lids as a result of a run in with corneal erosion on Thursday night, once they deflate fully things will look a lot better.  I really like how the taupe took away the scaryness of all that colour and of course once I put my glasses on it takes things down a notch as well.  For a night out I would definitely just put a little of the opal glitter in the inner corner just to lift that area and I might be tempted to pull more of the navy up into the outer V, I played it safe this morning so as not to frighten myself! I am surprised at how comfortable I feel in this much colour, I think the darker hair helps a lot and having agreed with Helen that scarves do me no favours I felt the need to wear this one just to pull things together until I stop spending money on teal eye shadow and start spending it on teal clothes!  Just in case anyone is wondering I am wearing ELDWL, Clinique colour correcting powder, Laura Mercier Second Skin Blush in Rose Petal, Dior Addict Extreme lipstick in Paparazzi, Benefit they're real mascara and Benefit Browzings in light on my brows, which are also much better with my darker hair.

And whilst I need no encouragement if anyone has any other eye shadows that they think I might love please let me know.  I did find the most gorgeous teal sweater in Monsoon that is now on my wish list, along with fuschia leather gloves from M&S, also on the list!  As a result of all of this I felt it only right that my much beloved UD Naked palette wasn't left to languish lonely and unloved so I have given it to Emily, needless to say I am currently her favourite mummy!
    

Finally NYX v Tom Ford!

I don't think a post on this blog has ever had a bigger build up!  I was so excited to try the NYX eye shadows that they arrived, were photographed in pristine condition with 2 different cameras, swatched on my freshly shaven arm, then my hand twice; once without UDPP and once with and applied to my freshly cleansed eyes all within an hour of delivery!  I am going to keep the words to a minimum as there are a tonne of photos.

 


Top is with flash, bottom is without.  Seriously, aren't these beautiful?  The shades clockwise from the left are Golden, Rust, Walnut and Red Bean Pie.

 
All are described as shimmer and/or metallic.

Golden

Rust - a dupe for MAC Cranberry too apparently!

Walnut

Red Bean Pie - poss dupe for MAC Trax or Sketch?? Similar gilded purple shade.

 Beautiful.  In terms of texture they are all soft and smooth, Red Bean Pie is the only one that was a bit dusty and you can see that in the swatch pics.

Rust, Golden, Red Bean Pie, Walnut both pics in natural light.

The longer swatch is without UDPP and the smaller dot below is with it

 Hope this isn't too many pics?  I am always disappointed with blog posts with 2 or 3 pics, hope you feel the same way!

Dear God, I have sent myself to sleep with all these pics!

 I decided to apply them to my eyes without using UDPP, just to see how they lasted without and also because as the swatches looked so intense with it I thought using the shadows first without might be a bit less scary!

 Initially I put Golden all over my lower lid - it was very golden indeed!  I then put Walnut on the outer corner of my eye and then Rust into the crease, at this point I was wondering if this was all going to come together or not!  I decided to spread Walnut over the whole lower lid to take down some of the brassy'ness.  I then felt the whole thing really needed grounding so I applied Urban Decay Whisky pencil on upper and lower lash and water line, which seemed to suddenly pull everything together.  I then ran a bit of Hustle from the Naked palette over the lower lash line and then smudged a bit into the crease to take down Rust which was dominating.  It was only after blending that I realised that Red Bean Pie might just have been perfect instead of Hustle - next time!


Now all I need is some one to buy me the Tom Ford Burnished Amber Quad and I can do a proper comparison!  But here are the pics, what do you think:

Thanks again Klara for the pics of the real deal!

 Not a dupe, of course, but not totally wide of the mark either!  Hope you enjoyed this marathon of a post!

NYX v Tom Ford - UPDATE!

Just to let you know I have had an email from NYX to say the 4 eye shadows I ordered have been dispatched, fantastic service as I only ordered them yesterday!  Blog post coming soon.  Weirdly enough since I have ordered these I have been a bit meh about my Naked Palette - am expecting a bolt of lightening as I type that - hopefully having some additional warmer shadows will help me to mix things up a bit. 

Tom Ford Burnished Amber v NYX Singles

After Karla suggested that I might get on quite well with Tom Ford Burnished Amber quad I decided to have a look at Google images.  Of course pretty much the first site I ended up on was this one, weird that!  Having just discovered an absolute love of warm eye shadows I was instantly smitten and Karla's gorgeous photos were just making things worse tbh.  Did a big more googling, found some more images, lust turned to love and I knew then that the Tom Ford quad had to be mine.

Then I Googled it with a view to purchase. Sixty Two quid!!! Seriously, 62 fine English pounds.  Dear Mr Ford are you having a laugh?  I know that quality costs and that the aspirational value of your products knows no bounds but sweet baby Jesus there is no way on god's green earth I am parting with £62 for four eye shadows, even if you licked each one yourself.


But I am a half full kind of a girl and what do half full girls do when faced with an impossible purchase?  Why they find a dupe of course!  Even if it takes them hours and hours. And hours and hours.

Lots of lovely ladies suggested that MAC Cranberry would be just the shade I needed to bring out the red in Chanel Ebloui.  I had no idea what that looked like so I googled it and interestingly enough found several blog posts that compared MAC Cranberry to NYX Rust.  A bit of further reading and it  seemed that NYX gets a lot of love.  Having decided that NYX Rust would be a suitable replacement for MAC Cranberry and having realised that NYX has getting on for seven trillion eye shadows I wondered if perhaps I could put together four eye shadows that would match in colour, if not in quality, the Burnished Amber quad.

Top Row - thank you Klara for letting me use this.

                              NYX Rust

Bottom Row - again thanks to Klara

NYX - Red Bean Pie

NYX - Walnut Bronze

Now we all know the quality isn't likely to be close and the colours might not be exact but, but, but - it's pretty darn close!  

Whilst I was doing this I did notice that there is a trio from NYX that has Rust, Golden and Walnut Bronze in it and this costs £7 so with the addition of Red Bean Pie for £4.50 you could get the whole lot for £11.50!!  That said looking at the fantastic NYX swatches here I think Walnut is warmer than Walnut Bronze and might be closer - what do you think?  Again on these swatches Red Bean Pie looks closer than it does in the image above, where it looks a little too purple.

There is no way round this, I am going to have to do an NYX order and see what I get.  If you look at the swatches and come up with something you think might be closer to any of these please let me know!!

Many, many thanks to Klara for kind permission to use her wonderful images. 

Completely forgot to put the NYX on line store link on this post so here it is - have spent many a happy lunch break browsing since I found this!

 

Chanel Illusion d'ombre - Ebloui

Or, my antidote to Spring!  Have been discussing on twitter how I feel the Spring collections are best left to those in the first flush of youth, rather than those whose flushes are an indication of imminent decrepitude.  Pastel anything leaves me cold to be honest.  Some of  you may also have seen my tweets re Chanel Illusiore d'ombre in Ebloui, I fell and I fell hard!  I googled every blog that had ever blogged a photo of it, google imaged it til my eyes bled and still wanted it.  In the end I convinced Steve that buying it for me would unleash a wanton (one ton?) sex goddess and frankly if after 23 years of marriage he's still stupid enough to buy that line who am I to feel sorry for him?

Of course when it arrived my CId'o *rolls eyes at stupid length of name of gorgeous product* was showing signs of being a bit dried and shrunken. 

Instant gratification girl that I am it took me six hours to think sod it and stick my fingers into it anyway!  In all honesty I think there have only ever been a couple of things in my life that I wanted to touch, and yet was afraid to touch in case it spoilt them, as much as this and neither of them make for suitable subjects on a beauty blog.

Its a sort of pouffy mushroom of loveliness in its pristine condition, see I bet the people at Chanel would have loved that "mais qui, c'est en pouffy champignon d'amour".  Bear with me my porridge is wearing off. And then when you touch it it sort of turns into a  gel/cream type texture.  I have long shunned cream eye shadow as I rather like the ceremony involved when applying shadow with a brush; sweep, tap, apply, repeat - lovely.  The whole dob your finger in the pot, smear the colour on your lids thing is a bit lacking in elegance, to my mind.  But this was Chanel, so I was prepared to make an exception - dobbing and smearing anything from a pot with those interlinked "C's" could never be other than elegant.  

This describes itself as "long wear, luminous eye shadow" I took the pics below after 5 hours of wear and I think the evident creasing belies the claim of "long wear".  I deliberately didn't apply a primer, well I've lost my udpp so I don't actually have a primer at the moment, to see how this would fair on my dry, crepe'y eye lids and it's a little disappointing on the wear front.  Everything else about it is to die for though. Oh my god the colour, I love it!  It pulls a little more bronze on me than I had hoped, I was really wanting it to look more red and initially was disappointed but in daylight the colour is beautiful enough that the fact is more brown than reddy isn't a major issue, am thinking that a careful purchase of something to put in the crease to pull the red/berry tone out of it will help.  I am also considering purchasing an eye liner pencil in a berry shade.  Possibly a Chanel one...... thanks to this particular blog post - thanks Klara! I am having a bit of a love affair with eye liner pencils having applied my UD 24/7 in Whisky recently and been impressed by how much more "made up" it makes me look, something new to add to the lust list! 

So how does it look on?

Gorgeous!  Even in the sub-par environment that is "the context of my face".  I did just apply Ebloui all over my lid and well into my crease, Whisky on lash line and water line, top and bottom and mascara.  Still loving my MAC Tenderling blush which I think works really well with this and Bobbi Brown lip pencil in Cocoa which sort of browned down my Benefit lipstick which is pink but I can't remember name of!

You can see the creasing quite clearly - this was applied at 6.15am and I was taking the pics at about 11.15am.

Whilst I hate the pic it does show this off nicely!  I am really glad I opted for Ebloui and I think I might go down the route of a Chanel pencil rather than buying Illusoire, although then again, I might not - will need to see it in the flesh to make a final decision.  If anyone can recommend an eye shadow I could apply in the crease to pull out the red tones in this please let me know.