Sephora Haul & Review

I of course succumbed to the Sephora 15% Beauty Insider sale I posted a little while ago. I received my package quite awhile ago but I only recently got a chance to really open it up and see how everything was.

Well, first of all, here's the box filled with my goodies.

Looks great, right? I ordered the Tarte Spring Greening Reusable Palette and the Are You A Scweppicure? Kit (the lipbalm is going to my husband and I'm keeping the bag). The Tarte palette is Limited Edition and Sephora claims it is worth $95. I was really excited about opening it up and was sorely dissapointed. You'll see why. In general, I've been pretty impressed with Tarte's LE palettes. Most of the time you get at least 1 full sized product in them, if not more, and generally the eyeshadow palettes are full sized... I'm going to dissapoint everyone and tell you that the eyeshadows in this palette are tiny. Super tiny. As much as I love the idea of the cute little carrying case, the kit would likely be mutilated in my bag, I can just see it slowly ripping to shreds. And the lipglosses are equally as tiny and actually in mine they look 3/4 of the way full. If that weren't enough, the lipglosses don't have names - the description says they are all new shades but are they permanent or LE with the case? Who knows! See the picture on the right to see the size of the palette in relation to a nickle.

Apparently these eyeshadows are new (LE?) minerals eyeshadows. I found many of the colors rather unremarkable. I haven't even tried the lipgloss but see the lipgloss tube on the right that looks slightly used - never touched by my lips at least? I suppose these eyeshadows are nice colors for spring but I found a few of them to be rather chalky (almost like Tarte's old formula of eyeshadows) especially the purple shade and even when I first opened up the palette, I noticed a bit of shadow around the edges. Swatches below. I think I'll be returning this. Unimpressive.

To the left we have the top 2 shade on the right 2 fingers (I should have done swatches backwards in retrospect but hey, jeweled thumb is new so I have some learning to do! Get it jeweled thumb with eyeshadow? Isn't it catchy... ok maybe it's not as entertaining as I think. Onward. The bronze shade 2nd row on the left is the finger farthest to the left.









On the right we have my actual thumb with the very pale pink shade which goes on more of a neutral beige bordering on pink.







And to the left we have the bottom 2 shades. The purple on the left is actually several layers of the purple shade. I really had to dig my finger in there and if you notice the top of my finger is kind of bumpy? That's the layers of the shadow. I found the purple shade the chalkiest of them all, which is a shame because it is beautiful. There is a subtle blue iridescense to it that is really quite pretty.


So that's the palette. Do I think it's worth $96? Considering the shadows are quite a bit smaller than full sized Tarte shadows, not really. Not unless the bag is suddenly worth $40! It is a nice palette if you are really looking for something travel worthy and are into the shades and are new to Tarte too sheer! For someone like me that has many of Tarte's palettes in addition to several individual eyeshadows, I'm not sure it's worth keeping, even at 15% off.

*Edited to Add*
I actually tried swatching they eyeshadows with a brush and they were so sheer it was almost laughable. You could barely see any of the colors, and then I tested the glosses just to make sure I definitely didn't want it, none of them showed up on my lips. So I sent it back today (4/29).