Eye Shadow Shopping Tips

How To Make Great Purchases

Purchasing eye shadow can more often than not, be an exercise in frustration. For every few you pick out, there will only be one you likely wear.

Why?

Details like formulation quality, performance, color choice, reflective properties and skin sensitivity are all issues that will determine whether you actually wear the eye makeup you purchased, OR NOT.

These tips will help you make better shadow choices that will not only look great and wear well, but shopping for them will become a pleasant purchase experience.

What You Need To Know About Eye Shadow

1.  The difference IS in the details.  Be aware of quality details when comparing low end, to medium and high price points.

Eye shadow comes in many formulations with great range in quality. Not always but generally speaking, you will find that eye shadow performance will be linked to price point.

In other words, the better deal, low price product that looks the same, will not (in most cases) perform the same. Perform meaning, apply easily, evenly, and have some staying power.

A quality product will have a fine, soft, smooth consistency and when applied, will adhere to your eye lid evenly, with good color/pigment presence. You shouldn't have to re apply the product excessively to see its color.

A prestige brand like Christian Dior is very pricey but they do deliver brilliant quality when it comes to their makeup ( I would love to say it is all in the marketing, believe me.). Dior's Five Color Shadow palette kits, are especially beautiful and have received top reviews from professional makeup artists.  MAC single pot powder eye shadows, dominate my personal supply and they are great performing shadows but not inexpensive.

One mid to higher end brand that delivers great quality shadows, in beautifully coordinated colors and at a better price point, are Cargo Eyeshadow Palettes .

Brought to you by cargo color eye shadow palette at Beso.com

2. There are three main powder shadow formats; matte, satin and frost.

Knowing the difference is very helpful, especially if you have sensitive skin or your eye area has lines.

Matte shadow has no sheen or reflective qualities. Satin has some shimmer or reflective ingredients and frost has strong shimmer and reflective properties.

Shimmer and frosted shadows, will exaggerated the presence of lines.

3. Sensitive skin should stick mainly to quality matte and minor shimmer, satin shadows.

The old rule when it came to eye shadow was, matte by day and shimmer by night. However, these days, shimmer is in everything and often has a lot of appeal. If you are like me, wearing a frosted eye shadow for very long will result in irritated, itchy, inflamed eye lids. It is not a quality issue, it is the *metal ingredient iron within the shadow formulations, that produces the frosted shimmer, and my resulting skin sensitive reaction.

*According to the American Association of Dermatology, metal allergy is the most common type of contact dermatitis.

To spare myself of this reaction, I wear primarily matte shadows and strategically placed satin shadows. You can pick out the shimmer factor in an shadow simply by holding it up to the light and looking for reflective properties. You can also review the ingredient list for names like iron oxides and manganese violet.

4. Choose flattering colors.  Beautiful eye makeup begins with choosing the right shades for your skin tone, eye color, and even your hair color.

Here are some general rules of thumb. These rules are not absolute because some individuals can wear both cool and warm tones. What shades work for you will be lead by your skin tone, hair color, eye color and ultimately decided by your comfort zone and personal style. 

The real trick to finding eye shadow you like, after  you get off to a good start quality wise, is EXPERIMENTING.  There are some inexpensive artist style, multi tone palettes out there that will literally let you play with lots of colors, and determine what you really like. 

Generally, warm tones ie. earthy, golden etc. will compliment warm skin (yellow based, olive, medium to dark skin ) with eye colors medium blue, hazel green, hazel brown, medium brown.

Cooler tones, pastels etc will compliment cool skin tones (very fair, very dark, light to medium) with eye colors light blue, blue-gray, deep blue, clear green, dark brown.

Last word on eye shadow purchases...

With these four tips in mind, you should start to experience satisfaction with the purchases you make. Feeling good about your appearance really boosts your confidence, and makeup can really enhance your appearance.

OH YEAH, don't forget the value of quality tools for makeup application. Good quality, task oriented eye makeup brushes will bring precise professional looking results, not to mention make applications SO much easier.

Brought to you by eye makeup brushes at Beso.com

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