MAC Colour Added Eyeshadow Quad Review, Photos, Swatches

Christine — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 19:27:23 +0000

MAC Colour Added Eyeshadow Quad

MAC Shop MAC, Cook MAC: Colour Added Eyeshadow Quad

MAC Colour Added Eyeshadow Quad ($38.00 for 0.19. oz.) includes these shades: Laundry Daze (light yellow), Colour Added (bright yellow), Pre-packaged (muted turquoise), and Self-Serve (deep grey).

Laundry Daze is a pale white-yellow with this faint hint of green. There’s just something slightly green in it, but it doesn’t cast or really look green. Whatever it is, it actually works really well with the rest of the shades because it coordinates and blends into them. This shade has a satin finish and has good color payoff. It’s, perhaps, a much, much lighter version of Dior Garden Pastels. I couldn’t think of any other potential dupes.
Colour Added is a brightened yellow with a kiss of chartreuse. It had excellent color payoff and felt very smooth. It has a veluxe pearl finish. NARS Rated R is greener. MAC Double Feature 2 is noticeably greener but not as green as Rated R. MAC Bitter is closer but a touch greener. MAC Three Ring Yellow is pretty close.
Pre-packaged is a darkened navy blue with a hint of teal. It has a veluxe pearl finish. The color payoff is good, and the texture is soft and smooth. Bare Escentuals Water is a bit like it, but tealer and more matte in finish. Guerlain Les Gris has a similar blue but a little muted.
Self-Serve is a medium-dark gray-brown with a subtle pearled sheen. It has a satin finish. The color payoff is horrendous–it’s like a trick eyeshadow! The swatch I managed to capture is a layered swatch; that’s the color built up as much as I could muster. The texture is dry, stiff, and loathes to be blended. Guerlain Les Gris has a similar grayish-brown kind of shade with better color payoff, though it has more of a matte finish. MAC Scene is a bit similar but less brown. MAC Moody is darker and browner but seems to be kind of what they were going for.

Everything was looking SO promising until I swatched Self-Serve, and then the eyeshadow loving part of me died a little inside. I was like, “What? How could you be such a tease?” Of course, a mere swatch on the arm only tells a partial story, so I went to test it in a look. It doesn’t apply much better over bare skin with a brush, but it is slightly better. It definitely needs a primer to yield truer color payoff, but here’s the rub: it’s just as dry, stiff, and difficult to blend applied as it was swatched. This lack of blendability made it a really frustrating shade to work with.

I was loving the quad until I tried Self-Serve. It has potential, and depending on your level of patience and whether or not you have similar shades to the other three eyeshadows, it may or may not be worth it. The quality of the other three is much, much higher; the two veluxe pearls feel soft, smooth, and deliver so much color. If we ignore Self-Serve, the quad would have received an overall rating of an A. Unfortunately, Self-Serve is not just a little bad but really bad, which resulted in scores of 1, 4, 1, 9, and 1.5. (Packaging is a single score that isn’t averaged across the four shades since it’s not impacted by the individual shade’s performance.)