Juniper
When I saw MAC’s Smoky Eye Kit By Julie Verhoeven, my first thought was that it was big and bulky for a kit that contained 3 eyeshadows, a Technakohl liner, deluxe sized mascara and 2 brushes. I think there’s enough space in there for 5 eyeshadows or at the very least 4. Well, the mirror is almost the same size as the cover so that’s more useful than those in smaller kits.
I’ll start with the eyeshadows first. These are Naked Lunch (pink with shimmer in frost texture), Wedge (medium brown in matte texture) and Carbon (intense black in matte texture). I’ve never enjoyed using matte textures as they are difficult to pick up and blend. I’ve been using these eyeshadows with Inglot’s Duraline. With these eyeshadows, I really need an eyeshadow primer or Duraline otherwise it’d be very difficult to work with.
It’s much easier to pick up Naked Lunch than the other 2 and using a brush is the most effective way. I tried using my fingers and it was a struggle to get much colour. It’s also best to use a brush to blend as using fingers didn’t result in anything.
Naked Lunch is a nice highlighter colour which I applied all over my lids, it’s like a base for the other colours. Then I applied Wedge on the crease starting from the outer corners. I applied Carbon as the eyeliner because when I used the Technakohl Liner in Graphblack, it smudged within an hour or two. I think I’d better stick to using dark eyeshadows as liners. With Duraline, any eyeshadows can be turned into eyeliners.
On the back of the cardboard sleeve covering the Eye Kit are step-by-step instructions on how to create the smoky eye look. It is also a guide on how to use the brushes 275SE (medium angled shading brush) and 212SE (flat definer brush).
The brushes are serviceable but obviously no where as good as the full sized versions. At least they didn’t just include sponge applicators or tiny brushes in the Kit which would have served no purpose at all. However, 275SE is definitely a shading brush as I didn’t think it was that appropriately shaped for depositing colour on to the crease area. 212SE is pretty good for applying Carbon as eyeliner as the slant perfectly suits the shape of my upper eyelids.
I’ve never liked Zoom Lash Mascara as it doesn’t do much for my lashes and in deluxe form here, it does even less. There are other MAC mascaras which are better than this one but I think Zoom Lash mascara is almost always to be found in their eye kits.
If I had a choice, I’d have picked the Smoky Eye Kit in Plum as I thought the shadows there were better and nicer. The Smoky Eye Kit takes up too much space, perhaps it didn’t need that much height to begin with. There’s enough space to insert a drawer underneath for make-up instruction cards like what Too Faced does with their compact eyeshadow palettes.
