Too Faced Too Furious.

You know I try my absolute best to never, ever make impulse purchases. I generally don’t buy makeup without reading a ton of reviews first, because too often I buy something without research and end up with a product I hate and never use. I don’t know about you, but I don’t like the idea of having TONS of makeup just for the hell of it. I mean it’s not like shoes and handbags, you know. Makeup rots. Having loads of makeup you don’t use just means you’re hoarding bacteria and fungi.

The problem with only buying well-reviewed products is you’re going to find yourself with a boring collection full of cult-y products that everyone already has. So I try to branch out once in a while and buy underrated products or poorly-reviewed products that appeal to me. I mean who knows? I could end up loving it. That’s how I found myself with the Too Faced Totally Cute palette.

Now Too Faced as an overall brand doesn’t really appeal to me. Their overly-cute schtick is against my whole aesthetic, and I’m turned off by any brand which does non-stop collabs with Youtubers that I don’t like. But when I came across this limited edition palette, I for some reason found myself with a huge desire to own it.

There are two main reasons for that: firstly, this palette comes with stickers that you can use to customise the plain-pink palette– if I was Emily Weiss of Glossier, I’d be pissed tbh. Stickers alone are a stupid reason to buy a palette but come on… I have loved stickers since kindergarten. Anyway, the second reason is that this palette comes with some more exciting, unconventional colours like pink and green.

Like basically all the Too Faced palettes, this comes with some huge ass pans of beige, shimmery colours which I pretty much never use (I prefer using cream highlighters for highlighting my browbone and inner corners) but I kind of love all the other colours. I’ve been wanting a rusty, orangey brown like Bunny Fu Fu up there for the longest time and I is a bright pink that I’ve been dying to try for a while. I’m not really adventurous with my eyeshadow looks because I have small eyelids and I don’t have the space to do super mapped out dramatic looks but I’ve been daydreaming of pulling off an editorial wash of bright pink on my lids. Kind of like this. I’m not so crazy about the greens but anything to drag me out of my brown smokey-eye safe zone.

Unfortunately, I really do not love this palette. If you Google for reviews online, you generally get mixed-to-negative reviews and I’m sorry to have to attest to that. Below are swatches on bare skin applied using a flat brush.

L-R: Double Scoop, Shooting Star, Unicorn, Bunny Fu-Fu, Chocolate Donut, Clover, Storm Cloud, I

I know that they seem okay– in fact, almost impressive– in the picture above. But trust me on this one– these shadows are so frustrating to work with! Of all the colors above, I’d say that the only ones worth a damn are Chocolate Donut (which is a super boring brown you can get anywhere), Clover and Storm Cloud (I have to give it to Too Faced, though… Storm Cloud is super pretty. It’s a sort of taupey color with a purple iridescence to it… really unique).

For the others, they apply super patchy and you really have to load it on to get good coverage. I is super sheer and requires like 10,000 layers for it to look anywhere near to a runway pink eye look… it’s about as good as any one of those crappy pink glittery Maybelline single eyeshadows from the 2000s. And even once you’ve managed to successfully get good enough coverage, these shadows are difficult to blend and tend to just fade away when you’re trying to blend it well. I often find myself using my fingers to blend out the edges because using a brush will just take the whole thing off, which then results in imperfect, mismatching eyes. And even then… they don’t last long. I don’t even have oily eyelids, but using these eyeshadows with the Urban Decay Primer Potion, I find that at the end of a long day these shadows have faded significantly.

I’m going to keep using this palette, of course, because I’m not wasteful. But I’ll never feel excited about it. I’m just going to go back to ignoring the Too Faced counter after this. Oh well. At least the stickers are cute.

The Too Faced Totally Cute Palette is available in Sephora stores for RM139.