As a makeup artist, I regularly get asked the question ‘What’s your favourite makeup brand’.  Far too difficult a question to be able to answer, I love and use many brands and many products for many and varied reasons.  But when someone says ‘What is your favourite eyeshadow’ that’s a far easier question, and without fail, I always say ‘Estee Lauder make the best eyeshadow singles on the market’.

The colours are true and pure, the product itself is baked in a perfect way, you get very little crumble and very little waste.

The shimmers aren’t excessive and the mattes aren’t too flat.  They’re just perfect.

I do an awful lot of teaching, and many of my clients are a bit stumped with the basics when looking for neutral colours to suit their eye colours.  For those that don’t know, if you have blue eyes, look for soft ‘foody’ based browns, like creams, caramels, chocolates and biscuity colours, for those with brown and hazel eyes, go for natural browns, like sand, dirt, earth, brick etc.

Estee Lauder makes it simple.  They haven’t got fancy and pretentious (meaningless!) names for their eyeshadows, the names are reflective of the colours in the pan.

For our blue and grey eyed ladies, they have foody colours of Vanilla, Ginger Drop, Tea Biscuit and Praline, amongst others.  And for our Brown and Hazel eyed ladies, the natural colours have names like Ivory, Smokey, Bronze Cube and Copper Penny.

It takes the rocket out of the science and demystifies the makeup counter.

And in case you were wondering, that also applies to the other colours.  Choose ‘man made’ colours for blue eyes (go for Pink Ice, not Rose Confetti) and natural made colours for brown and hazel (go for Ivy, not Mint Ice!)

Although I preferred the packaging of the old pure colour shadows when they were in the cubes, purely because I could see the colours easier in my kit, I can actually stack the new flat shadows better and therefore get more in my kit…. definitely a good thing!

Sam Donald

www.samdonald.com