Last month, online beauty superstore Beauty Bay launched their first own branded products. All following the same layout and concept, the three Colour Theory palettes contained a whopping 42 eyeshadows. I purchased mine when they released, but it has taken me this long to summon up the enthusiasm to write about it.
As was to probably be expected, these palettes are produced in China. This is not always a bad thing - Morphe have become a household name (in the beauty community, anyway) by selling gigantic eyeshadow palettes rammed full of more colours than you could possibly need at over inflated prices and consumers just can't get enough of their new releases. Anastasia Beverly Hills also manufacture their palettes in China.
These palettes are a bargain, in that they have 42 decent sized shadows for £24.99 (don't forget that Beauty Bay do student discount too, so there's an extra 10% off there) and free shipping as it's over the £15 mark. Unlike the BPerfect Carnival palette, I think that this is a pretty reasonable price point.
The palettes are all laid out in the same manner. Each row is for a different stage in your eye makeup (base, transition, crease etc) with the columns making seven different eye looks. Of course you can follow the steps, or you can mix and match to make your own unique look. The possibilities really are endless. Or they would be if there weren't 376 shades of brown in each palette.
There are three different palettes in this range - Origin, a really pretty warm toned palette in pink packaging, Evolve, a very neutral palette with the odd pop of colour in yellow packaging, and Identity, which is described as "bright and bold shades". Well, there are some bright and bold shades, but it's mostly neutrals.
Origin caught my eye first. With it coming up to autumn, warm tones will be everywhere and I do love a pink eyeshadow! I decided against it as it looked too similar to the Lime Crime Venus XL palette which I have and I use fairly often. I decided to go for the "bright and bold option" and chose Identity.
The palettes launched at 12pm on September 13th. I managed to pick one up without any issue. I wasn't online the moment they launched, but I got mine about an hour later. I think they did sell out of all three palettes that day though.
This is what arrived - the palette came in a black palette with a very pretty blue holographic inner. The palette was in a blue holographic box, and came with some stickers and possibly a beauty bay discount code (I sold this as soon as I was done taking pictures for this blog so I really can't remember what else was with it) and some other postcards and stuff. These were all inside a pretty but completely unnecessary plastic bag.
They definitely get points for the stickers, I have such a thing for makeup companies who send me stickers, I love it!
Here's the inside of the palette - each column is numbered, and the rows are labelled for an easy step by step application. I decided to go for row 5 as I liked the red shades, but I fell at the first hurdle as the base shade was about 387 shades darker than my skin tone. No bother, I wiped it off and thought I'd crack on but substitute the base shade from column 1 instead. Fine, decent enough but not exactly up to Sugarpill standards (I use white eyeshadow every single day and I compare any white shadows to Tako from Sugarpill as it's my absolute favourite).
The transition and crease shades applied nicely, although when it came to the liner shade I struggled to get anything particularly visible against the other shades. I ended up blending the red liner shade on my lid and then the whole thing just went downhill from there. All of the colours just blended into one red mass, and even when I tried adding in some pink and purple to create a bit of dimension, I was just left with red everywhere. The shimmer shade that I used on my inner corner and browbone was less than impressive too. It's probably ok if you wet your brush before applying, but having to use a wet brush for eyeshadow is SUCH a pet hate of mine that I won't use eyeshadows if I need to do this. This was the result.
You can see that there's no issues with pigmentation, it's a nice shade of red and red shadows are notoriously difficult to formulate, but when I have to blend seventeen thousand different colours on to my eyes and end up with the same colour I started with after two shades then I'm not gonna be happy.
I hate these palettes. But then, I hate Morphe palettes, so I think that the Beauty Bay Colour Theory palettes will go down well with the teenage market, especially given how affordable they are. I'd say they're good for beginners, but if they all blend into the same colour then I'll have to take that back. Maybe the other two are better than this, but I really have no intention of finding out.
The mirror is pretty good though.
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