Kat von D Shade + Light Glimmer Palette Swatches and First Impressions

Left: Shade + Light; right: Shade + Light Glimmer

Kat von D powders have more than earned their reputation as some of the best in the game. Whether it's a face power or an eyeshadow, the formula is creamy, pigmented and blendable. I own a few KvD powder products and they're all really wonderful to work with.

The Shade + Light series, which kicked off with the contour palette, is a range of contouring products for face and eye. The series launched at the height of the contouring and matte trends and easily won a top spot in my makeup collection.

It's so smart of KvD to release the Shade + Light Glimmer palette when makeup's leaning towards a shimmery, glittery look. I have a soft spot for shimmery shadows and neutral shades and this palette more than fits that bill at first glance.

First, here's a comparison between the original Shade + Light palette and its Glimmer counterpart:

The palettes really struck me as being quite similar to one another - the original matte Shade + Light appears on the left, and the Glimmer on the right. Kat von D has a great layout on her palettes because they're divided into three sets of four shadows designed to work well together. It takes the guesswork out shade selection when trying to put a look together to have everything laid out in such a thoughtful way and I wish more palettes considered their layouts in this way. Highlighting shades are the larger pans in each quad, with your crease, lid and inner corner colors in the three smaller pans below each highlight shade.

On to the swatches!

• Porcelain is a shimmer yellow-toned highlight shade. The swatch was definitely a little chunky but the powder itself felt nice.
• Copper  is a super smooth, buttery metallic shade. 
• Bronze is a shimmery metallic with glitter in it. I was surprised by how much fallout this shade had when I swatched it - and even more when I used it for an eye look! My brush just seemed to dig into the product and gouge it.
• Sterling is a super shimmery, nearly white metallic that while not my cup of tea, certainly felt super smooth.

• Dusk, the first shade in the cool-toned quad, is a purple-toned highlighting shade. I had to layer this swatch for it to show up against my coloring, and that pigmentation issue is something to keep in mind when using it. It will likely highlight but very subtly.
• Cinder is a fantastic buttery cool-toned brown shade. I think it's one of the colors that'll work pretty well with every other shade in the palette.
• Onyx is an inky black shade with micro-glitter in it. Black is a tricky shade to pull off and Kat von D typically nails it, but this one was just a bit patchy when I swatched it. It's a nitpicky point but it speaks to how great a job KvD does in creating her formulas.
• Glacier is a frosty white shade with a slight undertone. It's pretty similar to Sterling but different enough to make sense in the palette.

• Dune, the final highlighting shade in the final quad, is an orangey, warm-toned shade. I think it'll be a great highlighting color for darker skin tones, and I'm happy to see a palette that considers everyone in its creation.
• Rust is my favorite shade in the palette - a coppery, burnt color that just swatched so smoothly and worked the best when I tried using it in an eye look.
• Jasper feels like a more muted version of Rust. Like other shades in the palette, it contains micro glitter for extra sparkle but feels like a shade that'd really transform when applied wet.
• Quartz is a great color but its formula feels like it has to be applied wet in order to get the best color payoff. On its own, it's more like a shadow topper than a shade unto itself - I used it to lighten and highlight a darker shade and it worked really well for that purpose. 

***

Overall thoughts:

• This is a hard palette to work with on its own - it's hard to create a look with all shimmery and metallic shades, so introducing matte shades will be key in completing a look. While the overall quality of the Glimmer palette is great it could be an expensive investment to have a palette that can't be used entirely on its own, especially when the beauty of buying a palette is to have everything you could need in one handy package.
• That said, an all-glitter palette is still a smart idea. Makeup addicts picked up their fair share of matte shadows and palettes when the matte trend was all the craze a few seasons ago. Now we have a glitter palette that we can use in connection with our mattes and in that way, we can pack or grab two palettes and have an endless combination of looks to create. 
• I think it's a great complement to the all-matte original palette and I'd choose the original over the glimmer one if I could only have one. I'd last done a review of the Urban Decay Naked Heat palette, which was the big summer shadow release. I've found myself appreciating that palette more with each use and wish that this palette had struck a better balance in its formulation of its shimmers and metallics to make it usable on its own.
• The shades that work in this palette really work. Metallics and shimmers can be tricky to create and maintain pigmentation when the actual ingredients are particles by their nature, and users have to be flexible in how they work with these kinds of shadows given their nature.