When I was looking for reviews before purchasing this palette, I could only find youtube videos where the reviewers were all using this palette for the first time. Unfortunately, none of them did a wear test. The r.e.m Beauty eyeshadow palette in Gogo Boots is just the type of thing that reminds us that first impressions are not sufficient reviews.
There are 6 shades in this palette, and the colours are, from left to right (love the names, by the way):
- so twiggy – a muted, grey toned champagne with a soft shiny finish
- hip – a mid toned taupe, with cool undertones and a shimmery, metallic leaning finish
- mini skirt – a shimmery light lavender, with a blue shift
- laugh-in – a matte light aqua green (my favourite)
- lava lamp – a very shiny, orange leaning copper with a pink shift and a few shimmer particles throughout (the most complex shade of the whole palette)
- hot pants – a shimmery dark burgundy with a black base.
Texture: the shimmers (which are 5 of the 6 shades) are incredibly creamy, to the point that they almost feel like a cream eyeshadow – like the ColourPop Super Shock Shadows, or the L’Oréal Infallible 24 Hour shadows. A stiffer brush is best to pick up a decent amount of product. The matte shade, laugh-in, is soft to the touch, and not dry or too firmly pressed.
Application: for the shimmers, I recommend using denser brushes to be able to pick up more product. There can be a bit of fallout, particularly with the shade hot pants. They can be applied wet, although I didn’t find that wetting them changed the results, either in pigmentation, shimmer or longevity. If I tried to blend them together, I feel like the shimmers meshed into each other too much and I lost definition. I applied them over different eyeshadow primers, and the performance did not change. The matte shade, although a bit powdery, applies evenly, with no fallout and not a hint of patchy-ness, and it blended really well without becoming sheer.
Pigmentation: so twiggy has medium pigmentation and you can build it up but you’ll get a lot of texture by doing that. Hip is quite opaque, although it looks lighter on the eyes than on the swatch. Mini skirt and lava lamp have some sheerness to them that I consider to be part of the eyeshadow, and not a fault – they are more airy, lighter, more “ethereal” shades. Laugh in is reasonably pigmented and easily buildable. The last shade, hot pants, is the gift that keeps on giving regarding pigmentation – it’s like never ending, you can get just a tidbit of powder and seems like enough to cover the whole eye. Whoever, it looks muddy. It looks muddy whether I blend it with a matte or a shimmer, a cool or warm toned eyeshadow, and I think it’s because it has a black base, so you lose the burgundy shimmer and are left with a dark, greyish brown.
Longevity: this is where things go wrong. The first shade, so twiggy, loses its intensity in less than an hour. It doesn’t totally fade but the shine gets muted down – by a lot. The shades lava lamp and mini-skirt lost intensity (shine wise) after six hours. By the 9 hour mark all shimmer shades lost most of their shine and hot pants just looks like a dirty dark grey.
But worst of all, the shimmers, without exception, did not stay put: I applied them on a specific area on my eye and two hours later they would have spread beyond that and over other eyeshadows, so the look would lose all dimension and variety and just look flat and muddy. Applying so twiggy and hip next to each other, they blended into one another in less that 2 hours and it just looked like one shade. Another example: I put mini-skirt just on the crease with another brand’s cream eyeshadow on the lid, and after 3 hours mini-skirt had reached my lash line, covering the other eyeshadow completely. They behave like a moisturizer in the sense that they disperse through the skin as time goes on. The weirdest thing. Again, I applied them over different eyeshadow primers, wet and dry, and the performance did not change. They did not crease, but what’s the advantage of that if they don’t stay where I want them to?
The only good one is laugh-in. For a pastel, it held well throughout the day, with minimal fading after 11 hours. There was no creasing, and, thank god, no migrating.
Packaging & other info: price was 24,99€. The compact is better than pictures might make it seem – heavy, made of metal or metal-like plastic (I’m not sure, but it’s cool to the touch), with a mirror on the inside. Unfortunately, the names of the eyeshadows are not in the compact, just in the outer cardboard packaging you throw away. Total amount is 7,9 grams, and I don’t know if the amount is evenly distributed (the outer most shades seem to have a smaller pan) but that’s about 1,3 grams for each, so about the full size of an individual eyeshadow.
Final thoughts: Never would I have thought that the best shade in the palette was the matte pastel – and it is a pretty good one by the way, almost makes the entire palette worth it, considering it is not that expensive. I just want to point out again that you can’t trust first impressions: I was so pleasantly surprised by the swatches, and so utterly disappointed when I actually wore the shimmers. When it comes to r.e.m. Beauty, I’ll stick with the highlighters. Maybe other palettes that have more mattes in them are better, but I’m not in the mood to try my luck again with them. Unless you are a matte mint eyeshadow fiend, don’t purchase this.
