Beauty Review: Charlotte Tilbury Instant Look in a Palette in Seductive Beauty

So I’m trying to get back to blogging after that long hiatus with a quick review, of the Charlotte Tilbury Instant Look in a Palette in Seductive Beauty, also known as the palette that only took me a month to hit pan. I was going to do a review when it was all new and pretty, but hey, it means I have thoroughly tried it! Thankfully I took some photos earlier.

I got this in London for £49, but today there’s a sale going on and you can get it for £34.30 on the website – I don’t know how long the sale will last so if you want to get it, don’t wait. There’s 5x2g and 2x6g of product, which gives it a total of 22g of product – which is really not much and it will become an issue, as I will elaborate later.

The packaging is really nice and classy. It’s in a brown and rose gold plastic palette, with 3 2g eyeshadows, 2 2g blush, a 6g bronzer and a 6g highlighter. It comes with a nice and big mirror – which I appreciate because it makes it so travel friendly. I’ve brought it on my month of travels, so it’s taken some knocks but none of the powders have broken.

The texture is great across the board, with slight quality differences between the eyeshadows and face products. The eyeshadow powders are soft and buttery without being powdery and the pigmentation is great. Although it wasn’t powdery, I did have some fallout when applying so I would recommend tapping off excess powder.

The bronzer and highlighter is marginally harder than the eyeshadow, but still very easy to apply and blend. The highlighter shade is rather useless because it’s so close to my skin colour. I didn’t expect the bronzer shade to work well on my skin as it doesn’t look that dark, but it’s amazing. I use it across my forehead and the sides of my face, as well as to contour; it gives a really nice summer tan to the skin and somehow makes my skin look nicer.

The blushers are very soft and slightly powdery; the fact that they are in eyeshadow-sized pans and stuck in between the bronzer and highlighter makes it extremely difficult to use because it’s hard to find a small-enough brush to only pick product up from the blushers, and I hit major pan in one within a month. Also, the two blushers are meant to be used at the same time – with the lighter shade “swished” across the cheeks, and the darker one for a “pop” of colour; the product placement in the palette makes it impossible to execute.

When I bought this, I was about 2 days from embarking on my month-long holiday and I decided to only pack this as my face and eye makeup because I needed space for a month of clothes. Because of where I was going – with a lot of beaches and nature, I didn’t use much eye makeup. I did use bronzer and blush daily – the bronzer is very pigmented so I didn’t need much, but the lighter blush did not give much colour and also because it’s so difficult to target just one, I just sweep both blush pans at once.

I think the fact that I managed to use up nearly all the blush within a month makes it rather expensive for the palette. I do like it – the texture is great across the board and I adore the bronzer; the packaging is also really nice and classy. However, the palette is meant to be travel friendly and it wouldn’t be that friendly if I don’t have a blush or if it’s so difficult to use the blush. Would I purchase this palette again? Probably not. I think I would rather buy the products separately because it would be much easier to use.