Today I'll be talking about the newest addition to the Catrice Family (okay it came out a month or two ago, that's when I got mine). It's the Prime and Fine Professional Contouring Palette.
I'm not too big on contouring, or at least I wasn't before I got this palette. Why? Because I didn't have a right toned (gray, or ash) contour shade. I do however have many brilliant highlighters.
I picked the palette in Ashy Radiance which is meant for light toned girls (pale as death, practically). The price is set quite low, compared to other contour palettes out there - it's less than 6€.
There's another palette for darker and / or yellower complexions which contains a more appealing highlighter. One which I'd actually use.
Read more after the jump,...
Official description:
The Prime And Fine Professional Contouring Palette offers a professional set for contouring every shape of face. Two easy-to-blend nuances are the ideal helpers: apply darker shade below the cheekbones, along the hairline, the sides of the nose and beneath the jawline. Apply the lighter shade on the brow bones, inner corner of the eyes, center, of the nose and above the cheekbones. With a practical how-to-use guide on the reverse.
Packaging:
The palette contains two pans. A smaller one which is the highlighter (because you probably don't need as much highlighter as you need the contour shade) and a bigger one which is the contouring shade. It looks quite sturdy, but it probably won't survive many falls. Thinking about how clumsy I can get, I think it would survive about 2 falls. Depending on where it gets hit. Whoops. However the design looks nice and classy, but not overly expensive.
Pigmentation:
Contour - I think the darker shade comes off with the right amount, not too much and not too little. For a lesser opaque effect, I like to apply it with a wet sponge.
Highlight - this one is more pigmented on a first swipe than it was when I transferred it to my skin my with my finger. But because of it, it gives the nice not too much in your face effect.
Okay, now here's my before the contour & highlight pictures:
I applied both the highlight and contour with a wet makeup sponge. The smaller I used for the highlights (cheekbones, cupid's bow, a bit of nose) - it's from Ebelin. The bigger is from Ebay and I used it to define my cheekbones, hide my double chin and "shorten" my very long forehead.
Why use a wet sponge? I feel that it's easier to blend, but then again I'm a contour newbie so I did overdo (otherwise it wouldn't show up in pictures). But now I've learned that having a dry sponge may be a bit easier for beginners to blend in the contour. However, it's still great for highlights!
The contour. It's not perfect, but you get the idea of what I did.
So, I need to blend more. YES.
I noticed that contouring and highlighting makes a huge difference in pictures. Also in real life, but you have to have a very light hand with the darker shades or it is just too weird.
+ the price (compared to similar products) ~6€
+ staying power (stayed on the whole day)
+ easy to work with
+ cold toned contour shade (instead of those orange things)
- I wish the highlighters were switched, but that's just a personal preference
I think that this little contouring palette is perfect for the price point and actually even better than some of the similar products out there. Way too many palettes have warm toned (orange?) darker shades that don't suit lighter girls, except if they want to look like Oompa Loompa.
Luckily this palette doesn't do that (yay!), however, I do wish the highlighter was less cool-toned, and more, you know, interesting (like the one in the darker set). I do have other highlighters that work better for me, but for traveling purposes it's kind of pointless to bring more products with you than needed. Now I can finally ditch my bronzers and concentrate the art of creating shades where they would normally appear (but they don't have a chance, haha - double chin, y'all).
I also don't normally give 5 stars to a product, since none does impress me that much. But Catrice deserves them for actually listening to customers which wanted ash toned contour shades.
Here are some girls that reviewed the same palette:
Taya wrote about it, here,
Mateja did a review, too.
Adjusting beauty took the time to review it too.
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