*on loan from my lovely friend Kat

A while ago the Louise Young line became available on Beautybay.com and the Essential Eye Palette 1 was a bit of a lemming for both myself and Kat (thanks pixiwoo). Well she beat me to it and snapped it up first! As we like to do at work on the rare occasions we're on the same shift pattern, is loudly and over enthusiastically compare notes on our latest beauty acquirements/lemmings/raves/rants (I'm sure much to the annoyance of anyone within hearing distance eg our entire floor lol).

So on one of our shifts together Kat bought in her newly acquired LYEP 1 with the sad news it was craptastic really disappointing - especially for the price point. She wondered if I wanted to borrow it and see if I could get it to work for me as she'd had no luck. Of course I said yes!

On to my thoughts about it! The LYEP1 is described as:

My first impression was for such a hyped up palette was that the packaging itself, while minimalistic looking and somewhat chic, it was actually pretty plastic-y and cheap feeling in person. The lid had one of those annoying overly tight latches that destroy your manicure in the process of opening the damn thing, which I hate, but once opened at least the hinges are nice and solid enough that the palette is well balanced and can stand upright on its own when open.

Inside the palette is a mirror and an included itty bitty, super hard bristled dome brush that I have no idea how the hell anyone thought it would be a good eyeshadow brush >.> personally I think it would be a MUCH better lip brush or maybe even a concealer brush. Its bristles are so tightly packed and solid that it doesn't pick up product well at all let alone pack it on the lid - which is it's only conceivable purpose cos there ain't no way that brush is going to blend shit!

Kat even attempted to use it with one of the shadows and you can see how it took gouges out of the soft product! I've finger and brush swatched into that particular shadow and the dents are still there!

  

On to the shadows. There are 5 matte shades in the palette, ranging from light to dark across 4 shades with one contrasting tone. The colours are described as:

Pigment wise all 5 have decent pay off and you can see in the swatch photo below the descriptions are fairly accurate.

That's about where the good points end for me. Overall I find Ting, Black Bear and Sislet all to be powdery to the point of massive fall out. I feel Maowi and Pom Pom don't appear to be as powdery but that could be due to how light weight their colours are. All except Sislet are cool toned looking on my NW20 skin but I don't mind that as I have a massive soft spot for cool and neutral matte taupe shades.

Overall this palette is just meh for me. The powdery-ness-over-priced-crappy brush-included-cheap-palette-feeling-blah-ness of this palette would of been ok as I like the colours Maowi, Pom Pom and Sislet however the sheer inability to easily blend any of these shadows and price point make it a big no. Shame really 'cos I've heard such good things about this and I feel kinda relieved that I dodged a bullet (that subsequently got Kat) and got to try this before I bought it.