Project Use My Palettes – October

 

I fully own that I am a palette junkie. For some reason, it is very difficult for me to resist buying new palettes, even though 90% of them are all variations on neutral color schemes. Yet, something about the designs always get me.

And for the very reason I love buying palettes, it’s hard for me to actually rotate through using all of them. I usually end up using just a few, admittedly very boring, palettes. I decided to start a challenge to use all of my palettes, including that ones that actually have colors that I always aspire to wear and never get to.

Now we’re halfway through October, but I think this actually works well since I can give you some of my initial thoughts on how this is going so far.

To keep myself from going crazy, I’m not just using one palette a month, but four. Four, so I have variation in colors and textures and use in different looks, but still few enough palettes that it really exercises my creativity to use some color combinations I wouldn’t normally use. I don’t know about you, but even when I use just one palette, I tend to gravitate toward the same few shades and the same color combinations. The logic behind this challenge is that I have to change up my look and color combinations so that I don’t get bored doing the same looks every day.

So – four palettes, four weeks…countless looks. Let’s see what palettes I’ve decided to use in October. I’ve also included swatches to show you all the shades I’ll be working with.

Note: Because I’m also a sucker for limited edition products, a lot of palettes I feature may be limited edition or discontinued.

The first palette I chose for this month is the Too Faced Chocolate Palette. This is such a classic neutral palette that I just had to have, yet haven’t used quite as much as I wanted to. I love the shades in this palette, so I definitely wanted to use more of the shades in here.

The next palette is the Juvia’s Place Masquerade Palette. This is a palette that I was absolutely entranced by when it was released, even though I rarely wear color. I’ve had this for a few months now and had only been using the neutral shades, so I’m putting this back in my rotation to encourage myself to use the colors. And as you can see, these are just absolutely gorgeous and vibrant shades.

Another colorful palette is the NYX Cosmetics Elements Palette in Earth. These came out last year, and thought the color schemes of all of them were just fantastic. I bought Earth and Fire and have enjoyed using them on and off.

 

Finally, I made an easy and compact palette to keep in my gym bag, so I grabbed some singles from MAC and Make Up For Ever and put them all in a Z-Palette. The shades starting at top and going clockwise are: MUFE S602, MUFE M660, MUFE I648, MUFE I544, MAC Blanc Type, MUFE ME614, and MUFE D712.

So now the problem is actually capturing all the looks I come up with, which I am pretty horrible at doing, but I did manage just a couple from the first half of the month.

First look:

For this look, I used the Juvia’s Place Masquerade palette. I used a mix of Cairo, Ada, and Zulu to blend and contour, then topped the center with Zola, the icy blue shade in the top right corner. I loved how this turned out, though you can see the blue starting to smudge into my upper eyelid already. This has been an issue everytime I use one of the shimmers in the palette.

I’m wearing MAC Chili lipstick on the lips.

Second (and last) look:

This is sadly just a sad office selfie, but I LOVED how this turned out. I used primarily the NYX Elements Palette in Earth for this using the cool taupe shade to blend andon my lids, and a mix of the burgundy and red shade. It made a wearable and also slightly different type of neutral look that I usually do.

So what are my thoughts on this so far?

I am really loving doing this challenge. Like I said, I’ve been challenged to be more creative with my looks, and I think it’s been working really well. I’ve also been able to test out how much I really love each palette and shades, and how they really apply.

A few quick thoughts.

The Too Faced Chocolate Palette is really an underrated palette. The shades are beautiful, all are great quality and blend really nicely, and the combinations might seem boring, but they all work really well together. I’ve been wearing this for work looks that are fool proof.

I was probably most excited to keep using the Juvia’s Place Masquerade Palette, and after using it more often, I’m actually not quite sure I like it so much anymore, unfortunately. The matte shades perform great, so those are fine. The shimmers swatch great, but they don’t really last on my lids. As buttery and soft as they are, they fade so much on my eyelids after just a couple hours, and they also seem more prone to creasing. I’ll keep experimenting with different application methods, but my love affair with this is slowly fading.

The NYX Cosmetics Elements Palette in Earth is a pleasant surprise for me. I loved the look of these shades when I got these palettes, but never really tried doing some more creative color combinations other than using the neutrals and some of the red tones. The shades are quite as buttery and creamy as Too Faced or Juvia’s Place, but the drier texture doesn’t prevent them from applying and blending well.

Finally, the custom palette that I’ve created has everything I need to create a basic work look, which is just what I was going for. I’ve got a transition, a matte highlight, a couple shimmer lid options, and an outer corner option. This is a great way for me to also use the single eyeshadows that I have.

I have two weeks left in this challenge and I’ll keep you all updated on how I fare in this challenge!

Have you done a challenge like this before?

As always, thanks for reading!