BeautyandtheCat x Hourglass Ambient Lighting Palette

New for Spring 2015

Announcing the EXCLUSIVE and LIMITED* BeautyandtheCat x Hourglass Ambient Lighting Palette ($65). Specially designed for fair to light skin, this collaborative project combines three of Hourglass’s existing Ambient Lighting Powders to maximum effect:

Diffused Light / texture-softening, redness-reducing pale lemon

Ethereal Light / brightening, white veil of chiffon

Dim Light / light beige sheen with healthy peach tones

The BeautyandtheCat x Hourglass palette is a departure from the Ambient Lighting Palette in Hourglass’s permanent line. Although both palettes feature the glowifying Dim Light, the BeautyandtheCat edition omits the bronzing shade Radiant Light in favor of color-correcting Diffused Light and features shine-free Ethereal Light in lieu of the more conventional highlighting shade Incandescent Light.

Available for purchase now.

* EXCLUSIVE and LIMITED to anyone who buys a custom Ambient Lighting Palette from Hourglass’s store in Venice, Calif.

Hehe, did I get any of you guys? OK, so I won’t be winning any Photoshop awards, but moving on . . .

Hourglass has a store at 1351 Abbot Kinney Blvd. and one of the coolest things about it is the option to create a custom palette of Ambient Lighting Powders. (Sorry, no custom blush palette. Yet.)

2016 Update: Hourglass has made the custom Ambient Lighting palette available on its website for $70.  The options are still limited to the 6 original shades of finishing powders (no blush, highlighter, or bronzer). 

The process is straightforward: select the powders you’d like in your palette, and then the sales associate glues the pans into an empty palette and attaches labels pre-printed with the shade names to the palette’s underside. It was pretty neat seeing the sales associate pull out a sheet with, like, 16 pans of Dim Light arranged neatly on it.

I chose Diffused and Ethereal–figuring that these would be more suited for my palest times during the winter (and apparently spring, if the face-freezing polar winter blasting the East Coast is an indication)–and Dim for a veil of glowy warmth. (I’m currently around a MAC NC15 or paler. In horror movie terms, much darker than Clown but barely darker than Vampire.)

Mini-reviews of my handpicked powders:

DIM

I knew from having the regular Ambient Lighting Palette that I really liked Dim (it’s my most-used shade), so that’s why I chose to include it again in my custom palette. For you fair-skinned kittens, take care to apply lightly.

Although it’s not dark enough to be a bronzer (despite the swatch photos above, where I turned up the saturation just to get the swatches to show up), it does impart color that, when built up, can make one look too beige and too sheeny. It’s best to apply a light layer and then come back to it a few minutes later to see whether you need more. When initially applied, it can look like nothing and so it’s tempting to get brush-happy and add too many layers.

ETHEREAL

This is actually a strange powder for its unapologetic whiteness and matteness. Thankfully, it’s super sheer and not uncomfortably dry on my already dry skin. It’s too white if overapplied and it’s not as easy to use as a highlighter as Incandescent or a traditional shimmery highlighter would be.

I would have preferred a satin finish (see MAC Mylar eyeshadow) to take away the flatness. However, I can see how the powder creates a subtler (much subtler) effect than an ordinary highlighter does.  Update: Compared to a truly matte powder such as Dior Rainbow Powder, Ethereal Light is more satin in finish.

DIFFUSED

This helps take away any shine from my cushion foundations and diffuses redness. If applied all over, I feel the need to add some dimension and warmth to my face using Dim Light, a contour shade, or a bronzer.