Laura Mercier Editorial Intense Clays Eye Palette | Review & Look

I was excited to try the Laura Mercier Editorial Eye Palette Intense Clays.   Disclaimer: This was sent free for review from Influenster (my first box from them! :D), but all opinions I’m about to write about are my own.

I had never heard anything about this palette on blogs, YouTube, Reddit, or Instagram, so I was pretty curious about how it was going to turn out.  Laura Mercier shadows haven’t stood out to me.  I see them as a high end, mature brand with sleek beautiful packaging and great base products like foundation on the same level with brands like Bobbi Brown or Lancome.

I was happy to see that the color range was silvery champagne, bronze, gunmetal blue shimmers, and three mattes in ultra dark colors. A few months ago I got rid of all my Morphe palettes. They were big and bulky, taking up too much space in my makeup area.  I was a bit sad at the time to give up the 35K palette‘s gunmetal greys, browns, and blue. This PERFECTLY fills the gap in heart/ collection that getting rid of that palette left.

This palette contains:

Three shimmers / Metallik Rust, Metallik Pewter, Metallik Platinum

Three mattes /  Blackened Black Clay, Blackened Blue Clay, Blackened Brown Clay

Air-Light Setting Powder

 

The formula is extremely different than other shadows I have tried.  The mattes reminded me of art pastels- easy to pick up on my brush and finger when I was swatching and applying. The clay title is accurate in this sense.

I want to talk about Blackened Blue. When I use navy eye shadows from other brands, all I’m getting is dark, basically black navy, even when I blend it out. That is just fine, but sometimes when I use a transition shade with those, it can get muddy or hard to blend. This one looks dark navy when you pack it on, but when blended out you get a navy cornflower blue almost that is like my dream color. It has a built in transition shade pretty much, and is BLUE rather than just DARK if that makes sense? I can’t wait to use this one to create a navy smokey eye.  You can see what I mean in the swatches where it goes from deep to lighter as I lightened up pressure. It’s like a matte duochrome, minus the chrome.

I’m so into this idea and I want a DARK burgundy that can be worked out into a firey neon red. Does that exist? 

As you can see from the swatches, the metallic colors are beautiful. They felt creamy and picked up at the lightest touch of my finger. I am in a phase where I like to apply metallic shadows with my fingers to really get an intense effect, but these ones also worked nicely with a brush.  The matte black and brown would be great to use to set eyeliner or darken up your makeup.  On first glance, the brown looks black, but it is just an ultra deep brown. Like the blue, it’s dark at first, but blends out to reveal brown.

I have been loyal to Makeup Geek Corrupt as my black eyeshadow of choice because it is easy to work with.  I’m a scaredy cat usually when it comes to black eyeshadow. This LM one is a new texture for me and I am intimidated by it, but it could give awesome dimension if you build it up and work with the clay.  

 

I’m a bit neutral/ not interested in the setting powder in the Laura Mercier palette at the moment.   The one way I could think to use it would be to apply it over primer to set your base before going in with shadows. The texture of it reminds me a bit of the Bare Minerals Mineral Veil Primer, which I like to use as a touch up powder if I get oily. I haven’t been setting my eyeshadow base with a light powder lately- I want shadows to really stick and look bright and I don’t want them to be “more sheer and blendable” like I have for the last few months.  *New year, new eyeshadow tricks* jk. They suggest dusting it over your completed eye look to lock everything in place. I would definitely be interested in doing that with a matte look or as a final blending step. Honestly though for shimmers I don’t want to risk dulling the sparkle. Laura Mercier knows what they’re doing in terms of setting powders though, so I need to play around with this one more.

The Laura Mercier palette is pricey- $48 for six shadows and a setting powder.  It fits into my collection perfectly though because it is a small size and contains just the navy/ gunmetal/ bronzes I was missing in my collection.  I use warm browns and coppers more often than navy and gunmetal shades, so I wouldn’t necessarily want to have a fat bulky palette of all cool tones. If you were like me and considering getting the Naked Smoky palette to get a dose of cool toned colors in your life, go for this one instead.  The pigmentation is better than Urban Decay for sure and I’m still so thrown off that Urban Decay doesn’t know how to spell “smokey.”

Check out the photos below to see the makeup look I came up with using this palette.

 

Walking by this palette at Sephora, I may not have gravitated to it, but I am glad I had this opportunity to give it a try. I would even recommend this to my friends or anyone that has experienced overkill with warm eye shadows.  Swatch the mattes if you see this in a store and you’ll experience the clay texture that is hard to describe unless you feel it for yourself.

-Kim