Lancôme Spring 2016 My Parisian Pastels Shimmer Cube Eyeshadows and Highlighters Palette

This is my one and only concession to the pastel trend of spring 2016. It's all the pinks and ice cream colors I can handle, and they come in a cute little tin that would have equally appealed to my seven year old niece. I'm not entirely sure that Lancôme My Parisian Pastels Shimmer Cube Eyeshadows and Highlighters Palette is dripping with Chic Parisienne. It's more like a certain type of fashion(ish) illustrations that accompanies magazine articles about how young Parisian women don't get fat/ never wear the wrong eye shadow/ avoid the mall/ can talk about Sartre while eating escargot. Whatever. Would these magical creatures buy and wear Lancôme's  My Parisian Pastels Shimmer Cube Eyeshadows and Highlighters Palette? I don't know. I'm just Gaia, a middle aged blogger from New Jersey, and bought this thing kind of against my better judgment.

Let's start with figuring out what is this thing and why does it look so much like The Body Shop Shimmer Cubes? The answer to the second part might be easier, since I seem to recall Lisa Eldridge, the creative director at Lancôme being a fan of that product (available at Ulta, by the way). As for exactly what is this product, I'd say it is whatever you want it to be, as long as your vision includes shimmer. For colored cubes of pressed powder in colors ranging from greenish yellow to lavender. The pigments are sheer and almost all of them are decidedly pastel. But it's that sheerness that allows them to be used on top of other makeup colors to add a mostly refined shimmer to one's look. I admit that I'm fond of the idea, because I love playing, mixing, and layering, while giving a new life to old staples.

Basically, a touch of any of the palette's cubes over your blush or eye shadow gives it another (shiny) dimension). Speaking of the shine, it is mostly high shimmer, but without any glitter particles. In theory, you may be able to use the colors on their own if you're so inclined, but the cubes were not formulated with high pigmentation in mind, and the only colors with any survival rate are the darkest ones. They perform much better over cream shadows, pencils, and blushes, and also look decent over intensely pigmented powder products (or directly over a cream foundation, but application can be patchy). I use a fluffy brush to get them on, something like a MAC 217, or a finger for just a dab in the middle of the eye lid.

The packaging has numbers and tells which ones are recommended for face and for eyes, but I'm pretty sure that I've mangled the original setting, so I no longer know which is which. I'll go out on a limb and say that a greenish yellow was probably not meant for the cheeks, but who knows? Another word about packaging: each cube is independently ensconced in a small plastic box with a lid, which prevents a mess and any breakage. The thing is, that it's kind of annoying fumbling with the lids (you have to take the cubes out of the tin in most cases) as you're trying to be creative and do an interesting makeup look. My advice would be to keep the thing for an at-home use, remove (but keep) the individual lids, so the product is ready for you as you open the tin.

Bottom Line: girls just wanna have fun (but can probably find better ways to do it).

Lancôme Spring 2016 My Parisian Pastels Shimmer Cube Eyeshadows and Highlighters Palette ($59) is available wherever Lancôme  products are sold.