Eye of the Day - ELF and The Balm

 (Please ignore the stupid look on my face) 

This is a look I've been wearing a lot lately. I was sent some samples of the new ELF Cream Liner in Coffee, and The Balm Shady Lady 2 eyeshadow palette recently, and I have to say, I adore them both.  A closer look at the palette:

It's BEEYOOTIFUL.  Unlike many palettes, this one is endlessly versatile, and doesn't have any "random" shades thrown in just to make the numbers up, it's enormously flattering and will be suitable for a variety of skin tones. The shadows themselves are silky, buttery soft, and extremely blendable.  This has just become my desert-island palette, I've been carrying it around with me since it arrived.

The look I created above is a very neutral one, I used the pale pink (bottom right) on my mobile lid and brow bone, with the coppery brown (middle right) in the crease, and the taupe (top right) on the outer corner and as a liner underneath the eye.  Very quick, very polished, and very easy to kick up with a pop of any of the blue/purple/dark brown shadows on the left there as liners.

Here's a close up of the look:

Can't really recommend this palette highly enough to be honest, I love it.  You can buy yours from the lovely, lovely girls at Cult Beauty  for £38.  Pricey? Possibly, but you won't need any other eyeshadows for the rest of the year, if you get it, and these are really super-high quality shadows.

And I'm about to rave about the eyeliner as well.  Sorry, this is turning into a hella-gushy post!  I've always found ELF products a bit hit and miss, to be honest, but when they get things right, boy do they... I'm always dubious about cream eyeliners, sometimes they're difficult to use, being a bit "draggy", and then you have the transference problem if your eyelids are hooded at all, as mine are.

I used the shade "coffee" in a very fine line for this EotD, and I applied it with the ELF small smudge brush I bought recently.  It's very soft and smooth, meaning it can be easy to put too much on the brush, but I find just taking the excess off on the lip of the pot works fine.  You will probably need two passes of the brush over the lid to get the depth of colour you'd like, but with a formulation this soft, it's not a hardship!  The liner sets in a minute or two, and it's unbudgeable once it does.  (Is unbudgeable a word?  I guess it is now ...) No transferring to the crease, and no flaking or smudging on the eye, even when you wear it as a thicker, more dramatic line, as below:

As far as I'm concerned, this little baby has outperformed liners costing up to five or six times as much you can get hold of one for £3.50 from the ELF website. I'll definitely be buying the black and the blue, and I'll just have to live in hope that they'll eventually add a green and a purple to the range too, they're fantastic.

Okay, enough gushing from me (I'm really sorry, but you know perfectly well that I'm not this impressed with anything very often, so I hope you'll forgive me), what are your favourite beauty products at the moment?