Sunday, July 1, 2012

in which our heroine returns from sabbatical

Maybe it was not so much a sabbatical, which makes it sound like I was making macaroni jewelry with impoverished Costa Rican toddlers or surveying the world from a mountain peak in Tibet, as my coming undone, like a slow motion dive through a glass window.

On the upside, it could always be worse.  It could be 200 years ago where the only possible outcome was ending up in an opium den smelling of sweat and desperation, but it is not, and for this, I am grateful.

On a somewhat happier note, my medication regimen has been stabilized and Sephora partnered with color industry leader (yeah, I didn't know color was an actual industry, either) Pantone, first sometime in late 2011 to bring us the, in my never humble, never sorry opinion, poorly thought out Color of the Year product line.  Tangerine Tango is a nice color, but orange eyeliner is not a trend because it looks horrible, not because it is groundbreaking.

Pantone started in the 1950s as a commercial printing company and by the early 1960s (the Wonder Years, if you will) Hofstra University graduate Lawrence Herbert has simplified the company's pigments and production of colored ink into a solitary color system.  The colored ink production side of the company was booming while the printing side had become a financial drain, so Herbert bought all of the technology from the company and renamed the entire gig Pantone.  They are most well known for the Pantone Matching System, which is a "proprietary color space" (when you figure out the actual meaning behind that phrase, holler at me, because I haven't a clue and haven't any real fucks to give, either).  The Pantone Matching System essentially standardizes colors and color production so that, theoretically, it can be ensured that color is uniform even though manufacturers may never have direct contact with each other.  Product-wise, they are most well known for the Pantone Guides, which come in booklets that you can fan out so they look a little something like this:

photo credit: 123rf.com Royalty Free Stock Photos

They bring back memories of spending approximately 57 percent of my childhood in paint stores, stealing as many color cards as we could just to get home and dump them on the floor and be yelled at for our privileged wastelessness.  Company profiles and childhood anecdotes aside, Pantone has made Sephora palettes something actually worth buying.

Sleek packaging makes you feel like Rodeo Drive and palm trees.  Or maybe the Amazon rainforest.  Or maybe a praying mantis.  We could do this all day.

Makeup brushes deserving of their own plastic covers for holidays and dinner parties.  That is why the photo is blurry, after all.  Emulating your New York Eye-talian grandmother since...forever.

It is like a Sherwin Williams color card display...for your face.  The 8 year old in me rejoices minus the parental reprimands.

They are highly pigmented and while the color payoff isn't as good as say, Urban Decay, I think the colors are much bolder than the normal UD selections, and I often have the problem with UD of what is in the pot never actually transferring to my face as the same color (while they are highly pigmented, even when applying UD eyeshadows wet, they always seem to appear much more muted on my face, though I am more than willing to admit it could be something I am doing wrong.)  These don't wear as long as UD, but I can't think of many occasions I need 24 hour eyeshadow for, anyway.  I have Sephora's Blockbuster palette from last year, and the shadow formulation seems to have been changed, or they are using an entirely different formulation for their Pantone Universe palettes in an attempt to step it up.  I'm not sure, exactly.

Brush set and shadow palette for 100 dollars, people.  That's all I'm saying.  

On that note, my not-so-gentle readers! What do you want me to write about? What makeup product has you completely stumped? What makeup blog entry do you want to see?  I tend to overwhelm myself with all the makeup talk and not know what to write about, so help a girl out.