Oribe Illuminating Face Palette Sunlit 4,5 g

I was super excited to try this as Oribe hair care products are legendary. Hence, I was highly anticipating the arrival of their new-ish makeup offering, expecting it to equal the hair product line. (I also tried a lipstick – please see my other review for that.) Sadly, high expectations were not met with this product.Bottom line: As my title says, if you have $82 plus tax to spend on a gorgeous mirror compact, then you’ll be happy with this, for the mirror and the compact construction are the best thing about this product. The compact is on the smaller size – it’s the size of the palm of my hand (I wear ladies’ size 7 glove, so they’re small.) The mirror is gorgeous – it’s clean and crisp and has a small non-intrusive Oribe logo at the bottom. I love how it “clicks” shut with a firm but not too firm spring-loaded mechanism. The colour of the blue and gold edging is rich. It is just plastic but it feels sturdy. I also appreciate how the mirror can lay completely flat. It’s a treat to pull it out of your purse.But enough about the mirror. How is the makeup – the important bit? Well, here’s where it gets ugly, girls.The blush, bronzer, and white shimmery highlighter are jammed together in small stripes the width of your index finger. So really your finger or a small brush is the only tool you can use, which isn’t natural for blush or bronzer application. This is the main problem. No applicator is provided but there aren’t a lot of practical options anyhow.The blush is horrible. It’s shimmery. It actually brought out wrinkles in my cheeks I did not know I had. This should perhaps be a 2-star review if it were only about blush.The bronzer is very weaksauce. So I use that on my eyelids as a substitute eyeshadow – just a sweep of the finger. I use this when I’m lazy and can’t be arsed to contour the eyelid. So it’s somewhat usable but this is not fit for purpose re: bronzing.Really the only thing I use for makeup in this compact is the white highlighter/shimmer. I dab it in the corner of my eye and on the brow arches. Because highlighter is something used sparingly in any event, it’s not a problem.My suggestion for Oribe – I really hope someone from marketing or product development is reading these reviews. This could be such a better product if the colours were not lumped together in a useless palette. They should each have their own standalone compact – one for highlighter, one for blush, one for bronzer. Don’t try to justify the exorbitant price tag by passing it off as a “three-in-one”, because it does none of those properly. You’ve got a nice, solidly built compact and if you work on your blush shimmer ratio, and make the bronzer a bit more potent (and my skin is white as the driven snow), you may hit a target despite the price being steep.I’m surprised I’ve written so long about a makeup compact. Bottom line: it’s not worth $82 in its current state, unless you have money to spare. There are much better products out there in the market.

Perhaps Oribe assumes that because they’re renowned for exceptional hair care products, everyone will jump on the bandwagon for anything else they choose to put forth, nevermind poor quality and astronomical price. It’s hard to believe this product made it through all the hoops of development and testing. It’s hard to believe Oribe thinks this product meets the high standard they have for their brand.It’s a pleasure to open a tiny, beautiful box holding a luxurious compact, and Oribe delivers here. The packaging is lovely and the compact is somewhat unique and interesting. The excitement ended when I opened the compact to a dusty mess, with each color of the palette broken away from the others as if they’d not been properly compressed.I decided to ignore that disappointment, but the application experience and results were deplorable. The powder is so loose that a single pass over the palette with a brush makes a mess of the entire compact. Powdery particles were flying all around me too. I have fair skin, and was hoping for a brightening effect, but to achieve any effect at all I had to apply multiple times. This resulted in a pancaked, Tammy Faye Baker-ish look. It as if this stuff is completely void of pigment.I don’t know if I’ve ever given a product a one-star review before and I hate to be so negative, but I just couldn’t bear to think of someone paying $68 bucks for something so paltry and disappointing. Honestly, I recently bought a Sonia Kashuk bronzer in a pinch that works like magic compared to this, at a tiny fraction of the price.

My wife was very much looking forward to trying this makeup because of some of the standards set by some of the other Oribe products that she has tried. However, and here is the disclaimer, she really could not assess things as she would have liked because our example came to us, VERY badly abused/damaged. Much of the contents were broken into tiny pieces and were virtually unusable. Having more patience with it than I ever could have, she managed to collect piles of the 3 separate shades and try them all, to some degree.Here are her impressions,- nice night time shades- shades are a little to close to each other to obtain much variation on looks.- product has a wonderful shimmer to it- product is a bit too powdery, making application a bit harder to perform and consumption of product – higher, than most.- not oily- no negative skin reactions.- darker colors provided “decent” covering abilities.So, that is it in a nut shell. Unfortunately, the condition of the product upon arrival, prohibits a better evaluation than that. Although, with the results that my wife was able to achieve, she felt that this was like other Oribe products, heavily on the pricey side of things. She feels no need to change from her current product use.