Hey all, bear with my on the photos here over the next few weeks… I’m still trying to figure out the lighting situation in my new apartment, and I left my cute butterfly paper backdrop in AZ.
So if you remember back in March, I reviewed a couple of the Viseart palettes and I pointed out that they were great, but expensive, and designed to be used together by professional makeup artists to create looks, so they weren’t really easy for a consumer to use to create looks from just a single palette.
Shortly thereafter, Viseart released three Theory palettes, which were smaller, more affordable, and featured coordinated shades that worked together. All three are really beautiful, but I chose the Chroma palette because the other two were more similar to colors I already had in my Paris Nudes palette, and I also wanted to have a rich matte black in the Viseart formula!
The packaging is a minimalist matte black cardboard, and small enough that you could fit it in basically any freebie cosmetics bag you have lying around, which makes it perfect for travel, or even keeping in your purse in case you have a sudden surprise gig come up.
The palette unfolds as shown above, and the one thing I don’t like is that the flap doesn’t really like to stay open! Also, there’s no mirror, which does help keep the palette small, but makes it harder to use on-the-go. Not shown in the photo is the small plastic tray that pops over the shadows for an extra layer of protection (it was too reflective in photos). One really nice feature is that the pans are held in by magnets and are designed to be easily removable — I was able to slip a fingernail under one and pop it out with no trouble or mess. This makes it really easy to put the colors in a Z-Palette, or if you buy more than one Theory palette you can mix and match the colors.
The arm swatch is in random order, because I was swatching colors as I put them on my eye, and then I figured I should go ahead and show all of them. These swatches were done with various brushes, over bare skin. You can see that the matte white is pretty much invisible on me. It’s a sheer color, well-suited for a brown bone highlight. And the palest shimmer, at the bottom, seems to be a little lighter on the skin than in the pan.
In these photos, I’m wearing the medium shimmer over most of my lid, with the medium matte (which is a bit satiny) in the crease, a touch of the matte black in the outer corner and under the lower lash line to darken it, and then the matte white under the outer third of the brow. Like the other palette, the colors are elegant and subdued, apply smoothly, and wore well for a few hours. They even survived me doing some pilates and dance practice!
These palettes break down to be more expensive per oz. than the other Viseart palettes, because you’re getting 6 pans of shadow for $45 vs. 12 pans for $80, but on the other hand, you’re getting hand-picked coordinated colors that you can use together, in the most travel-friendly palette I own. I mean this baby is so small, you could even put it in a tiny clutch evening bag. And the colors are really versatile, you can wear the lighter ones during the day and then add the darker ones for evening or performance wear. Just like the big palettes, this may be the sort of thing where you want to wait for a sale or a gift card and then splurge.
I really hope that Viseart will expand this line, I would of course love to see one in olive and gold colors, but a plummy one would also be really nice!
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