BYS Browns palette

Having a weakness for brown/neutral shadows means I had to pick this up. Also, I saw some amazing swatches of this palette over at Marked Beauty so I was intrigued! (any excuse, right?)

BYS is one of those hit or miss brands - some stuff is good, and some is pretty pathetic. I'd say this one falls into the impressive category!

 BYS Metallics Browns palette

 Swatches of the first four shades (top row) - sorry it's a bit blurry, the sun decided to hide behind the clouds halfway through taking these photos!

Swatches of the top row

Swatches of the bottom row (last 4 shades)

What I like about this palette:

I love the colours, these are exactly the kind of colours I've been searching for. I bought MUA's Heaven & Earth but they weren't the right kind of browns for me. While these colours look very similar in the pan, they are slightly different when swatched. The last shade reminds me a lot of half baked from the Naked palette too. 

The pigmentation is very good - all the swatches above have been done dry using the applicator (no primer). 

The colours are long lasting with a primer - they last 12+ hours with my Too Faced Shadow Insurance primer (which is actually the best invention ever).

It's not too bulky and very light weight.

It's also been mentioned by Lauren Beautyy in one of her earlier videos, surely that's a good thing, right?

What I don't like

It smells overwhelmingly like baby powder - that's because it has talc in it. It's a pretty strong smell but doesn't linger upon application.

It's very powdery - while it is pigmented, it's soft and crumbly so there is quite a bit of fall out. This means it can become messy. I think for this reason alone, it won't be very travel friendly because it will just make a mess!

Overall, I really like this palette for the colours and I've been using it quite a bit for a simple daytime look. 

BYS is sold at Kmart, Gloss, the Reject Shop and a few other places (which I can't confirm) as well as online at http://www.fashionaddict.com.au/

I bought this for $4 but it normally retails for $5.

Have you got this palette? What do you think?

BYS Metallics Darks palette

Oh no, another BYS palette...luckily they're so cheap I don't feel guilty about buying them.

I am tired of hearing about how young I look. When I meet people and tell them I'm 20, they're usually like whoa I thought you were 16! Yeah yeah I know, it'll be good when I'm in my 40's and look 30. But I hate looking so young right now, no one takes me seriously. One of the main reasons is that I'm tiny - average height but I'm very petite and don't have much of a womanly figure to me. Anyways...

I bought this palette because I thought if I could do a darker, smokey eye look, maybe it would make me look more mature. For only $5, even if it didn't work out, it wouldn't be a huge loss anyway. 

I broke it by driving home too fast as I was so excited about buying this. No, not really, I must have dropped it or something. It left a powdery mess everywhere.

These colours are all really pigmented! One thing I noticed though is that a few of the shades are almost identical. I think a black shade would have been handy. They are quite powdery so fall out is a given. Other than that, it seems like value for money. 

I'm yet to try a smokey eye with this palette, perhaps you could suggest a tutorial for me? :)