I was trying to create a brighter eye look using a lot of matte shades, and they just did not layer and blend well together – I had patches of product missing in my crease. I couldn’t fix it, so I had to start over entirely and go with a different set of shades and layout.
We're here to help you make better beauty purchases that you'll enjoy and love! We recommend signing up to take advantage of personalized features like tracking products you own, viewing dupes that you already have, and more!
Here are some useful resources for you:
Curious how two shades compare to each other? Type in the shades below to get instant side-by-side swatches!
Comments that do not adhere to our comment policy may be removed. Discussion and debate are highly encouraged but we expect community members to participate respectfully. Please keep discussion on-topic, and if you have general feedback, a product review request, an off-topic question, or need technical support, please contact us!
Please help us streamline the comments' section and be more efficient: double-check the post above for more basic information like pricing, availability, and so on to make sure your question wasn't answered already. Comments alerting us to typos or small errors in the post are appreciated (!) but will typically be removed after errors are fixed (unless a response is needed).
We appreciate enthusiasm for new releases but ask readers to please hold questions regarding if/when a review will be posted as we can't commit to or guarantee product reviews. We don't want to set expectations and then disappoint readers as even products that are swatched don't always end up being reviewed due to time constraints and changes in priorities! Thank you for understanding!
We try to approve comments within 24 hours (and reply to them within 72 hours) but can sometimes get behind and appreciate your patience! 🙂 If you have general feedback, product review requests, off-topic questions, or need technical support, please contact us directly. Thank you for your patience!
I feel like I constantly harp back to when I was younger in these questions but sometimes the answer needs a little context. I would take a Maybelline black eyeliner pencil and run it back in forth in my crease. I would blend it with a brush and then I would use a product by Clinique and it was a wet/dry eyeliner/eyeshadow. They still make this product today although I had not used it since I was about 23. The color I used was a very dark, almost black, grey color. I would pack this color all over my moveable lid, up through the crease and stopped just over my hoods so that it was visible. Then I used one of two shadows, both by Shiseido and to this day I wish I could find them. Shiseido doesn’t make them anymore, to my knowledge. Anyway, they were “Silkspun Green Gold” and “Silkspun Purple”. I would take one of those shades and run it back and forth in my crease and peaking out just a little below the Clinique. Mascara and brow highlight and I was done. I got amazing compliments on my eyes. People would literally stop me on the street to ask what I had on my eyes. Men I didn’t know would come up to me at work and tell me what beautiful eyes I had. A few months ago I got to thinking about that look and repurchased the Clinique product. I found an eye shadow that I thought came close to the Shiseido and I recreated the look. Well, I am sure you can imagine what happened. It didn’t look cute on crepey eyelids. It looked like someone had punched me in the eye. How did I fix it? There ain’t no fixing that. I had to wash it all off and start over. I went with a light brown single matte shadow, a matte brow bone highlight and mascara. I put the Clinique product in the drawer and it is still sitting there. I really think I could have made it work if I just had one of those Shiseido shadows, LOL.
What a poignant recollection Deborah, I so love reading your posts.
That is so sweet of you to say, Genevieve. I think I share so much here because I am a natural introvert and can sit for hours and not say anything but there is something about being able to share anonymously that opens the flood gates. I really love this community and am surprised by how much I love it and have learned from all of the collective insight shared on this blog. Thank you, Christine.
Jiat LOVED your story. I am 53 and been making up since 8th grade and have my own arsenal but i think a story like yours, for ANY makeup fan is riveting! Thanks for the sharr.
The first time I used an Anastasia Dip Brow pomade I had way too much product and my brow was way too dark. I had to take it off and start again.
Ummm……
I tried yet again to do an eye look with all cool colors. A charcoal gray matte, an anthracite shimmer, and a cool light satiny nude. Yet again the result was ashy, odd, drab, and corpse-like against my warm skin tone, warm eye color, & with my warm hair color. So I just blended a wash of super warm rose gold shimmer over and it looked great! A litlle smokier than I’d intended for a daytime look but I wasn’t going anywhere anyway. I love cool colors but too cool & they go deathly ashy on me. Colors that are too warm tend to make me look jaundiced. Ugh.
Oh Bibi, I sure can relate! Too cool=dead looking ?, too warm=jaundiced?.
I can relate to that too!!!
In the quest for the perfect shade match I picked up a expensive Tom Ford concealer. I kinda like it but it doesn’t cover my dark circles enough. Using Becca peach corrector helped to make a big difference in the coverage.
I tried to bake my T zone because i wanted something more luminous and matte for all day long but my skin looked so dry … i just put some fix plus to remove all of that .
My Bye Bye Undereye is pretty finicky, a lot of eye creams seem to make it pill up and act strange – in that case I just have to pat pat pat and blend blend blend until it melts back into my skin. I also tend to struggle with liquid eyeliner – the last time I ended up with uneven wings I just took a clean eyeliner brush, dipped it in a tiny bit of eye makeup remover, and “edited” the wings down until they matched.
I had two major fails in the past several years that were so hideous, they always come to mind. First was when I was so fed up with spending $80+ for foundation that I rebelled and bought a DS brand, thinking I was finally going to get smart about not spending so much for something like a foundation. I’ve forgotten the brand name, but it was one of the big name ones, Revlon perhaps. Anyway, the color was a good match and I went with it. When I got home about six hours later, I couldn’t believe how horrible that s**t was. It had completely broken down and there were small circles of makeup pooled all over my face, I’ve never seen anything like it — truly ugly, horrible, awful, grotesque — and I was so embarrassed thinking about how many people must have seen me looking like that. I didn’t return it. I just tossed it in the trash, I was so mad. But, I should have returned it. Anyway, shortly thereafter I discovered Dr Jart BB cream and have never looked back at a $80 HE or experimented with another DS brand. The second major fail was a HE mascara, but again I can’t remember which one. I just remember thinking how wonderful it was going to look, because it had gotten a lot of good reviews and it was definitely one of the HE ones, so what could go wrong? After wearing it for four hours or so, I happened to look in the car mirror to check my lipstick, and I noticed I had black flecks all over the tops of my cheeks. Lots and lots and lots of them. Of course I had seen a lot of people during those four hours, and of course they said nothing. Ugh! Sorry I can’t remember the brand, but needless to say, I don’t experiment too much anymore with mascaras. And, when I get samples, I try them out at home first. Even a HE one can wear like a piece of junk. Plus, I’ve now found my favs and stick to them.
I’m still learning to blend colors with both my ABH Modern Renaissance palette and my Too Faced Sweet Peach palette, so muddy color fails are pretty common in my life, but I think my latest BIG makeup fail was when I was getting ready to go out one night, I did a beautiful job with my eyeshadow, maybe the best I’ve ever done. I started putting on KVD Tattoo liner and my eye suddenly blinked and the liner went all the way up across the lid into the crease. ARGH!!! There was no possible way to fix it, so I had to wash my face and start over. At this point, I was low on time, so the second go-around just wasn’t the same.
Trying to overblend the Stila magnificent metals liquid glitter the first time I tried using it- ended up with glitter flecks all under one eye, poo. I tried to sweep it away with brushes, sponges, tried to sort of cover the remaining ones with powder but I still had quite a few glitter specks on my face the rest of the day, ha 🙂 I learned my lesson though and am very careful to just pat it on now!
Pixiwoo tip: Tape, sticky side up, rolled around a pencil or pen; roll it over the glitter specks.
Recently saw a tip to apply mascara after setting spray, to avoid clumping. I gave it a shot and ended up with major black smudges under my eyes. I was able to wipe it away pretty easily but definitely not a tip that worked for me.
You mean like your lashes are wet with the spray and then you apply? I always save mascara for last…do my setting spray, then put some things away. After my face is dry I do my mascara, then I don’t have to worry about the mascara smudging under my eyes if I blink before the spray dries
I’ve been finding out the HARD way that applying powder cheek products over my It CC Cream can be disaster inducing. As in clown cheeks! Found out how badly it can go when I decided to wear UD Noho Jean-Michel Basquiat blush, and instead of going in with only the barest minimum, I did like I do over my foundation…. OMG. I applied my face powder over it to soften my now purple cheeks. Worked for maybe 4-5 hours? Later that day, I caught a scary glimpse of my face in a mirror at Marshall’s while holding a top up to my face! Lesson learned.
My last one was fairly recent – I was getting ready for the day and had an interview first thing in the morning. I didn’t like the look my favorite cream shadow was giving me. For whatever reason it just looked off that day, so I tried to add in some powder shadows to perk the look up. Yeah, that didn’t work out so well – I looked like a kid playing in mom’s makeup – those shadows definitely did not want to mix. So I grabbed the makeup remover, cleaned my eyes and started again with an entirely different shadow I knew I could do quickly to make up for the lost time and still arrived appropriately early for my interview!
I had one of those days where I just couldn’t get my cat eye to work, and I was out of tape. I ended up removing the tail part with makeup remover on a Q-tip three times before giving up. I just kept the liner on the upper lashline and touched up the eyeshadow near the removed tail.
I was on vacation and forgot my concealer brush. So I tried to blend the too faced concealer with fingers and it made a patchy mess under my eyes. I had to use more than usual and work fast in tiny sections. The setting powder made it better. I am usually able to blend the NARS radiant creamy concealer with a brush or lightly patting in with my fingers with no problems at all.
I recently tried to use a few different colours, a la Christine, but without the skill – it ended up looking confused and messy. I solved the issue by using a gold wash over the top.
My most common disaster is with lipstick, my lips are not symmetrical either top or bottom and it is really easy to get it odd or over-line trying to work it (my lips are big and overlining makes me look troutish). The favourite fixes for uneven/ undefined lips are to reline after lipstick application or use concealer/ nude eyeliner (I use the pixi brightening one meant for waterlines for this all the time) to crisp up the lines.
If I have ‘drawn outside the lines’ I tend to take the lipstick of and take my foundation sponge/ brush and buff over my lip area to even out the foundation again.
If all else fails slapping a lipsloss over it generally works!
Well here goes. I was trying to create the sculpted look/cheek bones / polished sheen look. I bought a very $$$$ sculpting palette, cover fix dewy drops. I then followed directions from some you-tuber and mixed them in my foundation. Next came the sculpting , bronzer and blush .Now I’m thinking this looks pretty good, from my 10x magnifying mirror. I pass a mirror at work and whoa, wth????? I looked like I could fry eggs on my face, bronzer looks like I brushed clay on my face, and here I stand, ready for work, but really wanting to go home and scrub my face clean. Well in the days to come, I learned how to add only a teeny, tiny drop of the dew drops to under my check bone. Tossed the sculpting powder out and learned a good lesson here. I really had high hopes for this, but we live and learn.
I’m always experimenting with makeup, that’s the fun part. I ordered an eyebrow stamp, it came yesterday. I was getting ready to go out today so I thought I would try it. I was kind of in a rush but it wasn’t brain surgery. I loaded the sponge up with the powder and lined it up with my brow and stamped it on. It was too dark and it didn’t quite line up properly with my brow, so I took a brush and tried to diffuse the color but that just made it spread out more and look fuzzy. I definitely could not go out looking like that, it was very noticeable. So then I took a cotton bud and put makeup remover on it and swiped it over a few times and it actually turned out okay. I don’t know if I’ll use the stamp again, I put it in a drawer, we’ll see. It was good for a laugh anyway.
Any time I try a liquid lip color, it is a fail for me. Most recently it was a ColourPop that was supposed to be satin but it was really matte. I tried topping it with clear gloss but found that I just have to remove it and use something else.
Using the Urban Decay Woodstock eyepencil as an eyeliner. Not a great look! It worked better as a lip liner.
I just had an epic fail when I was in Las Vegas earlier this week. I went to the NYX store, since I don’t have one where I live, and bought their brow felt tip marker in the shade that looked right based on the testers, Charcoal – it looked like the perfect ashy taupe. Well, it turned out the tester had dried out and with a fresh marker, it was plain black… Which I realized after doing most of one brow. I was running late for a work assignment, so I did both brows with it, which looked absolutely ridiculous (think bold black brows on a pale girl with light brown hair), but I mostly salvaged it using a ton of clear gel to dilute the marker and scrub some away with the spoolie. It was still way too dark and slightly uneven, but at least I didn’t look crazy…
Just this weekend, I went to a destination wedding, forgot makeup remover and got waterproof mascara all over my lids. I just blended darker shadow on top. From 3 feet away, you couldn’t tell.
I was mixing mac studio fix NC45 (too orange) and mufe UHD Y415 to get my color. I bought my first foundation, MAC SFF NC45, wrongly given by the MUA in the store (the whole MAC puts black women in NC45). It wasn’t a great service, but then, MAC stores are famous for their bad service anyway. A friend gave me Y415.
Since i finished both foundations I decided to buy NC44, which I was sure was my perfect color before I went to MAC (never trusting a MUA again?). When the foundation arrived I was so excited that I put it on to see how the color would work. The problem? Clean face, but no moisturizer (or primer).
The color was ok, but man! Did it cracked, caked, showed pores and fines lines! You name it, the foundation did!?? I felt ten years older with it on. I could double for Sofia Boutella in the mummy!