Better Together Eyeshadow Palette + Mascara + Liner

Stockholm was good to me! The previous time I was there, I looked at this Too Faced x Kat von D set that was slightly discounted, but decided not to get it. It bugged me later, and I decided to go look the next time in Sephora if they still had it. Not only did they, but it was even cheaper! So I just had to buy it :>

The set has a full size Tattoo Liner in black, full size Better Than Sex mascara and a palette with two different sides that are held together by magnets, so you can easily take them apart if you want to use only one side.

The Too Faced side of the palette. Better Together is the perfect light smoky eye shade for pale skin!

Kat von D side of the palette.

I think the set was well worth the money. I paid around 27 euros for the set on discount, and even the Tattoo Liner alone would have cost about 20 euros. The mascara I sold, as my eyes water easily and water soluble mascara is really not an option. I've been using the Too Faced side of the palette quite a lot, and the Kat von D side looks very usable for evening and club looks too. I really like the design of the palette and the magnetic connection. Easy to use, nice looking and the shades are great!

Everlasting Lip Liner by Kat von D in Homegirl

I wasn't too excited when I heard Kat von D was releasing lip liners, but when I realized the line had the perfect shade for my brows, I just needed to give them a go. I bought this one from Vancouver. I always use lip liner when I wear traditional wax-based lipsticks, to get more wear out of them. My go-to liners are Mac lip pencils, but occasionally I use an OCC liner or a Nyx one. The Mac liners are very dry (I mostly use Nightmoth and Cyberworld) and stay on my lips well. Kat von D's liner is very different. Where the Macs, Nyxs and OCCs are waxy and will eventually melt, the Everlasting Lip Liner goes on just like a wax based liner, but then sets and stays on much better. Much like the Everlasting Liquid Lipsticks, it is very resistant to smudging and can be removed only with oil-based cleansers (or actual oil).

Homegirl was my choice of shade, as I just never get bored of dark reds! I own a lot of dark red lipsticks so the shade works with many lipsticks, but I also do my brows with lip liner so I wanted a shade that works also for that. I have to say that for brows the liner sets a little bit too fast. I would need more time to work the pencil. The skin on my forehead is also much more oily than on my lips, so the liner doesn't stay quite as well as on lips, but it's still very good.

The pencil is made of plastic and is of the twist up variety.

The tip straight out of package.

Kat von D Everlasting Lip Liner in Homegirl on pale skin.

I have to say I'm quite impressed with how well the liner stays! The shade is lovely and the packaging works well. I could happily buy this product in another shade too!

Better Together Cheek and Lip Makeup Bag Set

I have many small pouches inside my large handbag to make it easy to find things. When they are in pouches and not floating all around the bag, my life is easier. That being said, when I saw the Better Together make-up collection that Kat von D and Too Faced made in collaboration, I just had to have the set with the super cute make-up bag! I love glitter and sphinx cats, so what could be better than a tiny bag with both? I resisted buying this for a long time, but when it was on sale at the Stockholm Sephora, I grabbed it.

Better Together Cheek & Lip Makeup Bag Set

The set, like the name says, has cheek and lip products. The mini Studded Kiss Lipstick is in shade Muse, a shimmery nude-ish brown, and the mini Everlasting Liquid Lipstick is XO, a bright red. On the Too Faced side there are two products, a mini Candlelight Glow Highligher in Rosy Glow and a mini Love Flush Blush in an exclusive shade So Happy Together.

The glittery doggie side...

...and the matte black kitty side.

The products are all mini sized. I understand that for some people they may seem weird, as they really are tiny, but I just love small things so they look super cute to me. Sometime small blushes are tricky to use if you can't get them on a large brush evenly, but I have not found this to be a problem with the blush or highlighter in this set. It could be after there's a dent in the blush, possibly then it might be hard to reach with a brush. I don't know if the highlighter is supposed to be used as two separate shades, but I've just swirled it all together. It's not too shimmery, but quite subtle, which I like.

XO is the liquid to matte lipstick and it's a very stunning red. Blue based and bold, the classic red I'd say! Muse is quite the opposite, a muted brown-red, very natural and easy to wear.

Of this set, the blush has become my favourite. It's a cool red, which works very well on my skintone, and it has just the right amount of pigment for my use. I want my blush to show a bit, not be just a flush of colour. Muse has been the trickiest one to use, but that's mostly because I don't wear wax-based lipsticks that often, they are just too high maintenance for me. For the discounted price of about 19 euros this felt like really good value for my money. For full price the products are too tiny and feel too plastic-y, and the bag is quite small. But yay for the glitter and the cute little nekkid kitty!

Kat von D Shopping

Kat von D is quickly becoming my most used brand. Not only is the packaging gorgeous and tickles my aesthetic preferences, the products are very high quality. I've been traveling a lot so the products in this post have been bought from Sephora in San Francisco and Debenhams in London. The liquid lipsticks have been my go-to product for a long time, but now I'm extending my Kat von D collection to other products too.

The Shade + Light Eye Contour Quad has been on my want list for a long time. I like simple palettes that can do light smoky eyes and more neutral looks with just a shaded crease. This Quad in Plum is one of those very easy to use shades on my complexion and the shades compliment my green-blue eyes. I wrote a full review here.

The Lock-it Setting Powder is a new product, I had not seen if before I came across it at Debenhams. I had been unhappy with my powder, the NYX HD powder is just not for my skin type or does not like the BB-cream I use for foundation. So I definitely needed a new one, and without even checking out any reviews, picked this one up. Luckily it works really well on me and I think there's enough for the rest of my life, the jar is HUGE ;D The sales person gave me a tip that the sealing sticker should not be fully removed, as the holes in the sifter are so big. It was an excellent piece of advice, as four holes open gives enough powder and makes using easy, as I can swirl my brush on the sifter.

Then one of the coolest palettes I own, the Alchemy palette! I have to admit I have not used it yet very much, just for the occasional inner corner highlight or lightly brushed on cheek bones, but just owning this wonderful item makes me happy <3 Just the hologram print and the triangle shape are super cool! I have been so busy I have not had the free time to wear wacky eyeshadow, but I will definitely give this palette more love once I'm home more.

The Alchemy palette has four shades. All are pale shades with an intense metallic sheen/shift. Conveniently the shift colours are marked on the palette, as it is a bit difficult to see the sheen in the pan, it comes out much better on skin. The photos of the pans look lame, and the sheen is quite difficult to capture on camera, but the effect is gorgeous.

Actually I have had not had the time to take pictures of the latest thing from Kat von D I bought, which is one of the new lip liners I hauled back from Vancouver. It's sitting at home on my vanity in its package, just waiting for the time to give it a go! (And then there's the Better Together items I found on discount in the Stockholm Sephora, so plenty of posts to come!)

Kat von D Shade + Light Plum Quad and Two Looks

I had had my eye on the Shade + Light Plum Quad by Kat von D for some time, but since I didn't come across any lightly used previously owned ones, I picked one up from Debenhams at London. They had a wonderful counter with shiny black antique furniture and lovely sales reps.

I didn't catch that the the palette has actual bevelled letters on the cover until I took it out of the cardboard box. I love it!
I really like the shape of the palette and the lettering is gorgeous.

Plum shades usually work very well on my eyes, bringing out the green in them. For some reason this palette is quite tricky to get to show correctly in photos. I think it looks too red in my pictures, when IRL the two middle shades, especially the darker one, lean more towards purple.

The shades don't seem to have names, so I'll call them by their use. Base is a pinkish beige, a bit darker than my skin but not much. Define is a deep plum, less red than in my pictures, but still with red undertones to make it nicely bring out green eyes. Contour is much like a darker version of base, but slightly more taupe and cool. Highlight is a very light warm pink. All of the are matte.

I did two different looks with the palette so far. All of the shadows are very pigmented but are still easy to blend. With so much pigment you really need the base shade to use as help when blending out the edges of the darker shades. I often use the same brush and just lightly brush off the pigment to switch to another shade, but with these shades you really need to grab a new brush if you go for a lighter shade. The two middle ones are intense and dark.

Highlight on inner corner and brow bone, define at the crease and outer edge, contour on the lid and blended up. I blended the edges of contour with the base shade. The liner is Urban Decay Delinquent, a dark purple with some glitter.

 I'm still learning how to do make-up after the eye lift, but I'm pretty happy with my lids now! I don't have to bring the crease shadow as high up as I used to, so I have much more space for blending it out towards the brows. Also my lids is more visible, so it allows better use of light shades on the lid, instead of everything looking like a smoky eye when the hooded part of the lid fell over the moving lid to hide anything I put there.

Naturally I wanted to try a smoky eye next!

For the smoky eye look, I put higlight on the inner corner and brow bone. The I added countour on the whole lid and blended up with the help of base. I then put define on the lash line on both upper and lower lid, and just a touch in the crease. The lipstick is a metallic liquid-to-matte from Milani. The look is quite dark, but that's just how I like it!

Look how the scar is almost invisible already! It's been a little over three weeks since the operation.

I would have wished for the shades to be even more red, to have a more stunning effect on my eyes. I have one ancient pressed eyeshadow that is just the right shade of plum to make my eyes look vividly green, but I have not been able to find anything that does the same. I still do like the Kat von D quad, it's easy to use, the highlight shade is good (I mention this because for some reason palettes rarely have light enough highlight shades for my pale skin) and you can do many kinds of looks with the four shades. The pigment is amazing and the texture of the shades is great, they are easy to blend and all the shades work well together. While this palette may not be the one I pick up for party looks, it is a very nice palette for sculpted matte looks and matte smoky eyes. 

Kat von D Sanctuary, Hawkwind and Crucifix Compared

I took a million pictures with my heavy-duty DLSR camera but in the end couldn't get the colours to look accurate in any of them, so instead I offer you iPhone snaps ;D

I got a couple of the new neutral Kat von D shades while in San Francisco and wanted to do a comparison with other similar shades in my collection. Beiges and browns are notoriously hard to get to look correct in photos, but I think I did a decent job with these. The pictures are taken in artificial light.

From top to bottom: Make-Up Monsters Wolfsbane, Kat von D Sanctuary, Kat von D Hawkwind and Kat von D Lolita.

Sanctuary works excellent on my pale skin with yellow undertones. It is warmer and more red than Wolfsbane, but still more towards grey than Hawkwind or Lolita. Wolfsbane and Sanctuary look much more similar in the tube than on skin. Hawkwind and Lolita are very close to each other. I'd say Hawkwind is slightly darker and redder, but the difference is very small on my lips.

Top to bottom: (Lolita peeking on top) Sephora Cream Lip Stain number 24 Burnt Sienna,
Black Moon Cosmetics Wrath (this one has a satin finish, that's why it's shinier than the rest),
Nyx Lip Lingerie 10 Teddy and Kat von D Crucifix.

Crucifix seems to be unique in my collection. The rest of my dark brownish tones are much more red than it. You can see that the Nyx Lip Lingerie is a lot thinner in consistency than the others, and Black Moon Cosmetics lippies are satin, not completely matte. The Sephora Cream Lip Stain looked like it could be a match to Crucifix in the tube, but on skin it's very different.

I really like all the shades I bough: Hawkwind, Sanctuary and Crucifix. They are very different from each other but each one is usable and the formula is simply awesome. Hawkwind especially is a very natural and easy shade to wear, on me it's one of those my-lip-but-better shades. Easy to apply, does not need major touching up, and wonderful shades. What more could you ask for?

Kat von D Everlasting Liquid Lipstick in Sanctuary

I was super excited that the Sephora I visited in San Francisco carried the new "nude" shades of Kat von D's Everlasting Liquid Lipsticks. I love the formula and many older shades have been excellent on my complexion, so I did some shopping and ended up with Hawkwind, Sanctuary and Crucifix. Sanctuary was the one I was on edge about and almost passed it by. Now I'm so happy I didn't, as it is becoming my favourite of these three! Sanctuary looks a bit grey-ish in the tube, but on my lips it turns to more of a pinkish beige. Quite natural and very easy to wear, even if there's some wear in the middle, it's not obvious.

The formula is once again great, stays well on my lips and does not feather or smudge. I feel these lipsticks are not as drying as most liquid-to-matte lipsticks. I use oil-based make-up remover to wipe the lipstick off.

So here's Sanctuary freshly applied on pale skin with yellow undertones!

Kat von D Everlasting Liquid Lipstick in Sanctuary

Now Playing Look with Glitter Bows

I seem to have found the background that is closest to my hair colour, so that I can perfectly blend in ;D Anyway, on Friday a friend asked me to come and see a burlesque show with her, and it was the perfect excuse to log out of World of Warcraft for a while. It was cold as eff outside, but that didn't stop me from putting on some fancy make-up.

The look is done with ColourPop shadows from the Now Playing set I reviewed. The lipstick is by Black Moon Cosmetics.

For some reason I look chubbier than usual in this pic. But it was still the best one of the set,
so you get a chubby me today.

I found these super cute glitter bows in the children's section at H&M. Couldn't resist! My fringe growing project is in a state that I usually need to pin back some hair to keep it from falling on my face constantly.

Metallic green lippie by Black Moon Cosmetics, this shade is called Myth.

Myth looks more teal is the shop pictures, and a bit more blue in natural light than my picture taken inside with just artificial light. I'm a big fan of Black Moon Cosmetics lipsticks and Myth is no exception, the formula is wonderful. Easy to apply, stays on well and doesn't need touching up.

ColourPop Patchwork on the lid, Babykins on the inside of the lid and Peekaboo as a tear duct highlight.

My brows are done with Obsessive Compulsive Cosmetics lip liner in Black Dahlia, and the eyeliner Kat von D tattoo liner is black. The Kat von D liner is hands down the best I've ever had. Crips, clear lines, no smudging, doesn't transfer on my oily lids = perfection.

Kat von D Everlasting Liquid Lipstick in Lolita II

Lolita II was one of the lipsticks I bought from Stockholm. It looked nice in the tube, but on my lips it's surprisingly orange. I think it's got something to do with undertones, but can't understand what exactly could cause this amount of orangey-ness ;D The normal Lolita fits me perfectly, but maybe this revised version is meant for darker skin tones or different undertones, as it looked a bit too orange on me for my tastes. Luckily it found a new home with a fellow beauty blogger, so no harm done!

This picture is straight out of the camera, no adjustments done.

On the lips and in the tube.

This was the first Everlasting Liquid Lipstick that didn't suit me, but all the other I've tried were perfect! The formula is good, but the shade just isn't me, so there's nothing wrong with the actual product :)