Sleek Vintage Romance i-Divine Palette

For this autumn, Sleek offers up the Vintage Romance i-Divine palette together with Antique blush. Being a collector of the i-Divine palettes, naturally I could not pass this up. Ordering from the Sleek website was a breeze and the products arrived swiftly in good condition. I was pleasantly surprised that although the palette retails at £7.99 and the blush is £4.49 in the UK, Sleek charged me £6.66 for the palette, £3.74 for the blush and only £2.42 for postage to Switzerland.

Vintage Romance features a lovely mix of dramatic stormy hues in autumnal tones of plum, burgundy and antique bronze, mostly with a shimmery metallic finish. The city-themed shade names add a whimsical touch in line with the theme.

For the most part, the eyeshadows have good color payoff, apply smoothly with easy blendability and do not result in too much powdery fallout. The most pigmented shade was Love in London (black with silver shimmer) which makes a great smoky liner shade. The only shade that disappointed in terms of color payoff was Bliss in Barcelona (deep purple) which require some layering to achieve an opaque finish.

Worn over a primer, the eyeshadows last well over eight hours with just a tiny bit of creasing at the inner corners.

Antique blush is a sedate dusky rosy brown hue shot through with silver shimmer flecks. This gives a natural tint of tan color to the cheeks without looking like glitter city.

Here are three looks which show the versatility of the palette. For the first look, I used Marry in Monte Carlo at the inner corners, Bliss in Barcelona in the middle of the lid, Love in London at the outer corners and Lust in LA blended in the crease.


The second look was created with Marry in Monte Carlo on the inner half of the lid, Meet in Madrid in the centre, Court in Cannes at the outer corners and Pretty in Paris over the browbone area. .


The third look was a combination of Court in Cannes on the inner half and Lust in LA on the outer half, with Romance in Rome at the outer corners.


Overall, I enjoyed the creative possibilities offered by Vintage Romance. There aren't any crazily loud colors. The burgundy hues like Marry in Monte Carlo can be difficult to pull off on my skintone but I just use these sparingly in combination with the other shades to avoid the look of an eye infection.

London Shopping Trip -

Earlier in June, I took a quick weekend trip to London. The timing was pretty fortuitous as the summer sales had just started with lots of good bargains to be had. & Other Stories is a new fashion label by H&M that just opened up on Regent Street. Decidedly more upscale with a classier, Zara-like vibe, it has its own beauty line encompassing both skincare and makeup.

I picked up four of the Eye Colours. Made in Italy, these paraben-free eyeshadows were pretty affordable at just £7 each for 2.8g, with a shelf life of 36 months. The clear plastic packaging is reminiscent of Shu Uemura's earlier cases, with the shade name printed on the front. The names are pretty quirky too. Below is Sarsenet Petrol.

Moreen Blue.

Sarsenet Petrol and Loden Green.

From Pixi in Carnaby Street, I got the Eye Glow Cube in Lucent Lid Light (£18), which contains 16 satin eyeshadows, two eyebase powders and two double-ended sponge applicators. After wearing these over the past two days, I was impressed by the silky textures, which have a soft pearl glimmer instead of flashy metallic shimmer and zero glitter.

The shades are also well-coordinated and easy to wear for daytime.

From RMK in Selfridges, I picked up two of the Ingenious W Powder Eyes and Sheer Powder Cheeks EX05 Orange Gold from the new summer collection.

Tempted by the nice gift with purchase of over £100, I also selected the Face Powder Brush. At £48, this was less than one-third the price of the outrageously expensive Suqqu face brush (£168) and rivals the latter in softness. There are reviews on Sweet Makeup Temptations, Delicate Hummingbird, The Non Blonde and Messy Wands.


This was the GWP.

Sleek just released their i-Candy collection for summer. I picked up only the i-Divine palette, plus the Lagoon palette from Ebay that was earlier released in April as part of the Aqua collection. I haven't tried these out yet.

Dainty Doll, started by Nicole Roberts of Girls Aloud for ladies with extremely fair skintones, seems to have quietly met its demise. Earlier this year, it was pulled from Boots and tons of stock ended up on discount websites like Fragrance Direct. I snagged these blushes off Ebay for just £3 each, down from the original retail price of £13.50. There's a documentary on Youtube on the creation of the brand that's quite interesting.

A tissue case and pouch custom-made with Japan-exclusive Hello Kitty Liberty prints by the wonderful Fushigi Shop. You can view the full fourth seasonal collection of Hello Kitty Liberty (Japan) prints on Liberty Japan. As adorable as these are, they are also incredibly expensive at 3150yen per meter.


The July issues of UK magazines came packed with generous beauty freebies, so I hauled an armload. To save on luggage space, I finished reading most of these over the weekend and junked them. I find most magazines these days to be rather vapid, so there was no point hanging on to them anyway.

This ModelCo Fibre LashXtend mascara was just alright and not quite worth the retail price of £16 as it takes quite a few strokes to build up the length. It's not as chock-full of fibres as Majolica's mascaras so it did not irritate my eyes.

Leighton Denny nailpolish duo worth £11.

Neal's Yard Power Berry Daily Moisturiser 50ml, supposedly worth £12.

Elemis Pro-Radiance Illuminating Flash Balm 15ml, worth £11.50.

Ciate mini caviar polish duo worth £10

All in all, it was a pretty productive weekend and I'm already missing London, despite the gloomy rainy weather and all.

Sleek Snapshots i-Divine Palette Swatches and New Store Display

At the Superdrug in Marble Arch in London, the Sleek store display has just been revamped with a new layout with several new products. The display looks larger than before, with the left side of the display devoted to the i-Divine eyeshadow palettes.

The new layout looks more neatly organised, with testers provided for virtually all products. Several of the testers, such as for the concealer and eyeshadow palettes, are placed in pull-out trays. This is much more convenient for viewing all the shades at a glance without having to open individual compacts.

There are three new Face Form palettes, each containing three powder blush and contour shades. The packaging is similar to the Blush By 3 palettes. The shades are mostly beige and brown tones.

There are also four new Correct & Concealer Palettes (£7.99), each containing a corrector, concealer and setting powder with SPF15. These were not in stock yet but they are already available on the Sleek website.

Next to that is a new Brush Kit of seven brushes. Hopefully, these will be an improvement over the previous brushes.

The i-Divine display had the tester for the new Snapshots Palette (£7.99). I hadn't read about Snapshots prior to seeing the tester in the store, but if you do a Google search for it, you'll find a Youtube video about it posted earlier in May. It seems like Snapshots was released a few months ago in Sephora stores in Italy, similar to how Oh So Special was first released in Sephora stores in Europe before reaching the UK. Snapshots is now available for sale on the Sleek website as well, but unfortunately, it cannot be shipped to the USA, like the Ultra Matte palettes due to restrictions on certain ingredients used in these particular palettes.

I did some quick swatches without any primer underneath. Snapshots contains a mix of shimmery and matte shades. The matte shades were noticeably poorer in terms of color payoff, whereas the shimmery shades were much smoother and pigmented.

The pale beige on the extreme right of the top row was sheer and disappeared into my skintone, so it's hardly visible in the pics.

Top row (from left): Magenta Madness, Purple Haze, Green Iguana, Sunset, Washed Ashore, Sand Walker

Bottom row: Tequila Sunrise, Humming Bird, Lotus Flower, Kiwi Flower, Martini, Summer Breeze

Seven of the shades, namely Magenta Madness, Sand Walker, Hummingbird, Lotus Flower, Sunset, Washed Ashore and Summer Breeze are actually repeats from the limited edition Monaco i-Divine palette from last year's Mediterranean collection, while Kiwi Flower looks very similar to Kiwi Zest in the Monaco palette. Also, Purple Haze, Tequila Sunrise, Green Iguana and Martini are repeats from the Curacao palette from last year's Caribbean collection. So if you already own Monaco and Curacao, you can definitely skip Snapshots.

The bright orange Tequila Sunrise is also a ringer for the orange shade in the Sunset palette (swatched on the extreme left in the top row of the pic below).

Hope this has been helpful!

Sleek Glory i-Divine Palette

With the opening of the London Olympics just minutes away, I thought I'd review Sleek's latest i-Divine Palette in Glory which was released earlier this month as part of the 2012 collection. The collection also includes a Pout Polish in Pride and a bronzer/blush in Honour, which I did not purchase as the brownish hues did not appeal to me.

Brimming with vibrant tones in mainly shimmery finishes, Glory is a fun palette to play around with for the summer. The shades are named after the London Underground lines, with their corresponding color codes. The top row of neutrals helps to balance out this palette, so you can create more understated looks as well if you prefer. The only mattes are Platform and Central.

The texture feels quite different from Sleek's earlier palettes in which the eyeshadows were embossed with a waffle pattern and often tended to produce quite a lot of powdery kick up when touched with a brush. The darker shades also tended to have messy fallout that can be a pain to clean up. The eyeshadows in Glory felt similar to those in Accessorize You Are Everything. They feel slightly smoother to touch, but the level of color payoff varies depending on the individual shade.


These swatches were done on bare skin without any primer.

Some shades were very sheer, like Platform and Hammersmith & City. Picadilly and Central also take quite a bit of layering to show up well. Circus, Victoria, Jubilee, Overground and Bakerloo swatched the most smoothly.

Circle (sunny yellow) and Central (bright red) are two shades that I doubt I will ever use but the other ten shades are very wearable for me. District and Picadilly are the shades that I get drawn to invariably when using Glory.


For the first look, I applied Picadilly from the upper lashline to the crease, District in the outer crease, Victoria in the inner crease, Jubilee along the lower lashline, Northern along the upper lashline and outer half of the lower lashline, and Tube over the browbone area.

Picadilly is a lovely glowy mid-toned blue but it applied sheer and required a fair bit of layering.


For the second look, I applied District on the inner half of the upper lid, Picadilly in the outer corner of the upper lid, Victoria in the outer half of the crease, Jubilee along the lower lashline and inner corners, and Tube over the browbone area.


Used with a good primer, the eyeshadows stayed crease-free and smudge-proof throughout the day, without any fallout on the cheeks. My favourite shade in Glory is District, a clean, bright teal.


List of ingredients