NYX - Eye Shadow base

So I'm finally getting around to doing a review for the NYX eye bases that I bought quite some time ago ( Hooray!!) The NYX website describes these as "Maximize the intensity, longevity and unashamed brilliance of your eye shadow statements with our eye shadow primer pots. Each of the three NYX Eye Shadow Bases—for vibrant, pearl or neutral tones—creates a smooth canvas for color, increases its durability and prevents fallout."

Sadly NYX still doesn't deliver to Australia! I purchased mine though Joys cosmetics on eBay. Joy's cosmetics is an awesome eBay store with just about any NYX product you could want, she is super efficient with items often shipping out the day of payment or the next day and typically take 1 week to reach me in Sydney. I believe I paid around $14USD for the whole set with approx $6USD shipping.

The NYX eye bases come in small white lidded pots that contain 7 gms of product ( it doesn't sound much but even with daily use 7gms will last an insane length of time) they have the NYX logo and the product type printed on the top and the product names on the sides along with the claim that they will give 100x more vivid colour, each finish has a different code number on it.  In the set there is Pearl - code ESB02 which is a sheer white with tons of shimmer. The   Matte - code ESB01 which is a really solid matte white, no shimmer or glitter at all and Natural - code ESB03- which is a Neutral nude colour with a slight sheen to it.

left to right, Pearl, matte and natural.

Onto the individual pots.
Pearl - shimmery slightly sheer white - Feels and looks a bit oily on the skin, this might not be a good choice for anyone with oily lids, it would probably slide around a little.

Matte - solid true matte white, feels and looks more dry and stickier on, it also does an awesome job of bringing out colours by providing a solid white canvas to start with

and Natural - neutral nude with a slight sheen to the finish, this is simply just a natural base, it doesn't particularly intensify shadows, and it has a light sheen and slightly more moist texture than the matte formula.

The swatches

left to right, Natural, Matte, Pearl

Personally the Matte is my favourite formula, I simply like the way it almost feels as if you have a nice blank canvas to start with, and on my lids the colours seem to be more brighter than when over the other primers.

The experiment!!!

I swatched a Chi-Chi pressed shadow in showgirl first on my wrist first with no base, this is the one.

This is a very shimmery colour in it's own right and I was interested to see if there was any difference to the finish of the shadow depending on what base it was swatched over. I then swatched it over the Pearl base, the Matte base and lastly the Natural base. This was done about 10:30 am.

Left to right we have - swatch on Natural, swatch on Matte, swatch on Pearl and lastly the colour on its own, no base at all. I looked and looked at the swatches on my arm, and there was almost no difference between any of them. Matte was no less shimmery as pearl was, which I believe is supposed to happen and Natural looks slightly different mostly as the underneath base is a different colour, but again there was no difference in the amount of shimmer to it.  I wouldn't at all be concerned about weather the matte was going to dull my shadows if I was only buying that one.

Next photo 4pm, after doing housework, picking children up from school etc, etc. As you can see the colours have dulled dramatically, but in all fairness an arm does get a lot more use than your eyelids do and I had a long sleeve jacket on outside when picking the children up.

This swatch shows me that the Natural and the matte base definitely last better than the pearl, and I do feel that is due to that oily texture the pearl base has. The swatch with no base is pretty much gone at this point.
At 9pm that night I could still slightly see the swatch that was placed over the natural base, so it appears that the natural base lasts longest on my skin, having said that arms are different to eyelids and I usually get a good 10 hours no creasing out of all the bases, when wearing them as intended.

They are a good budget product and if I have to purchase only one from the range it would be a toss up between the Matte and Natural, and I think realistically the deciding factor would have to be which colour you prefer to start your application over, Natural or white!

Happy Base hunting beauties :)

Mini Haul

On Wednesday I decided I'd had enough of hanging round home, cleaning, cooking... Blah, Blah, blah.... So I took advantage of my one child free day in the week and headed up to my local Westfeild, my mission was to acquire some of the Face of Australia, molten Metallic nail polishes, that I had seen featured on Little Jo's blog the night before. As soon as I spotted the white gold shade she was sporting I was smitten!

My local Priceline store had 4 of the shades I was after, Titanium - glittery high shine silver, Iron ore- black with silver glitter, Verdigris - metallic olive green and Amethyst - metallic purple, Not content to stop there, I hunted down the rest of the shades at my nearest Big W store, there I found Flaming Lava - bright metallic red, and White Gold - which to me looks like a pale metallic beige. These babies retail at $4.95 each and are just the prettiest colours.

LOL then I had all these new colours to play with and not being able to choose just one I used Titanium on every second nail and put one of each of the other colours in between - Sorry no pic's :( my nails are recovering from acrylics right now and aren't looking their best!

Well as usual 6 new nail polishes weren't enough for me so a trip to Myers/grace bros resulted in a bargain find of Chi Chi single shadows for $2 most of them were in the wrong boxes, so I spent a thoroughly enjoyable 15 minutes opening to boxes to see what was in them, I picked up 4 of these for a grand total of $8, gotta love that!

Next up the gorgeous packaging of the Sugar baby products was beckoning me, OK so I'm a sucker for a pretty box :) and the Good to Glow pack, with Mineral bronzer and illuminator got me... I think it was the leopard print powder puff that sealed the deal!

Chi, chi eyeshadow colours are -left to right, Funkadelic - pale shimmery pink, Showgirl - brown green duo chrome ( love that I found this colour in a pressed shadow for travelling finally!) Prissy Princess - pale aqua blue and Delusional pale simmer lilac.

What has been your favourite haul you have picked up lately?

Competition winners announced

Hello again chickadees

I have made a decision about the Name the Eyeshadow comp... and the winners are... fireworks and applause please first!

This time round I found it very hard to choose
as there were some awesome names in the comments, but I had to make a decision and here it is........


The winner of the red metallic shade is Scentsation, with the name CherryPie.  LOL going back to my teenage years where the song cherrypie by warrant was a firm favourite!  which is sadly showing my age
 :(  The phrase CherryPie always brings back teenage memories of hanging with friends and blue light disco's on Friday nights that were the highlights of our months social calender!

And for the silver, we have Lauzburger with CyberGirl... seeing as that's what we all are!

Congrats ladies, could both of you contact me on ritualeyes@gmail.com with your postal address and the choice of one other colour from the for sale album on Facebook, and I will get your prizes out ASAP :)

Competition time - Name an eyeshadow

Hi Ladies

It's competition time again, and seeing as it's against Facebook rules to post comps there unless you have a third party app to do it, I'm going to post it here.

I have 2 colours up for naming this time.
Lets quickly run through the rules again. you must be either a member of my FB page ( if your commenting name is different to your FB name, please include that in your comment ) or a blog follower. Comp open to Australian residents only, unfortunately postage O/S is too expensive at this time. Everyone gets to make 2 suggestions for each colour, and the winners are drawn depending on which names simply suit the colours best.

Time to get your thinking caps on ladies!

The first is the metallic red plum from the CoastalScents duping DIY blog.

The second is the silver with gold shimmer that I added to FB a few days ago.

Comp closes at 9pm Sydney time on Monday the 16th may.

Get commenting below and Good luck :)

DIY time - duping a coastalscents metallic palette colour

Hi again,

Well I have been hard at work ( cough, cough.... playing with sparklecrack really isn't hard work! ) duping a colour from my Coastalscents 88 metallic palette, seen here.  The one I was attempting to dupe was the last colour in row 9, it's a metallic red plum colour.

I swatched the original colour on my arm and started scrounging through my bottles of pure pigments looking for something similar to work with and ended up with a stack of colours to start with and some extras to use to tweak it out to get the shade close.

Using exact measurements and writing everything down as I went, I ended up with this set of variations :D

The colour I was attempting to dupe is circled, and the others are the many variations of dupes I made, I finally settled on one I thought was close, but when swatched side by side, my dupe had more of a purple/blue tone than the original had.....  mine is on the left and the original is on the right.

So back to the drawing board, starting with a different base toned red.  This resulted in many more attempts :)  One of which I was very happy with, again the circled colour is the one I was duping.

 and

 Again the circled one is the original, the one I decided on is second from the left!

I think I got close, what do you think?

Then I felt like just having a random play to create a deep brown with blue undertones, here is some of the many attempts at that, I did come up with one I am happy with :D

Does anyone have any high end colour they wish they could find cheaper dupes for, or have dupes for hard to get colours and brands?