Day 13: Biba Face Palette

Hiya,

Whilst wandering around one of the shopping malls in our city centre on my lunch break I found myself in the House of Fraser beauty department, (by accident of course) and spotted a discount table they had set up with lots of last seasons products or damaged items they could no longer sell at full price and amongst this table were 3 stacked Biba Face Palette's. They all appeared to be the same but in different levels of damage,  so reduced down from £34 to £17. Now I thought this was not an opportunity to pass up, after watching Lisa Elderidge's video's on You Tube describing her collection of vintage Biba makeup and her demonstrations of how the palettes compare to today's make up products.

Now this obviously wasn't a vintage palette, it was a new release of an old brand but I was still keen to try out the products Lisa raved about so massively so I found the least damaged of the 3 and took it the till. The palette includes 6 shimmery eye shadows a creme highligher and a shimmery blush, and it was the blush that had shattered and covered the rest of the palette. Despite this sounding pretty bad damage, compared to the other 2 palette's I left on the table it really was easily fixable.

When I got home I opened the palette and tapped it upside down onto some kitchen paper to catch the blusher and then used a fairly big blusher blush to clean up the the eyeshadows and the rest of the palette. The creme highlighter as you can imagine had clung to the blusher quite well so that took a little more cleaning but soon the palette looked as good as new if only with one pan empty. I decided that I was not going to try and recover the blusher in its pan form but instead put in a small screw lid tub to use as a loose powder blush instead (waste not want not and all that).

Both the outer and inner packaging was very classical gold inlay on a black background, and being shiny rather than matte means it is easily cleaned.

The shimmery gold logo harks back to the Art Deco era

The palette is about 2" wide, 3" long and about 3/4" deep, making it reasonably small if you wanted to use it for travel. However it is rather heavy at 125kg, which i think comes from the mirror on the inside rather than extra large amounts of shadow.

The palette contains 6 shadows, a creme highligher and a powder blush
which was broken so I had to remove.

Swatches are without primer or flash.

As you can see the lighter colours (1,3 & 4) are very light, however I think these will work really well as highlighters blended with the other colours. The darker colours (2,5 & 6) are highly pigmented, and swatch really well.  All the colours are very shimmery and catch the light beautifully, so will look lovely for a nude eye if you are having a bold lip.

The creme highlighter is very light on the skin and blends beautifully, it adds a delicate golden sheen to the skin, rather than a glitter or sparkle. This would work very well on the cheekbones and bridge of the nose any the other high points on the face.

Overall this palette looks beautiful from the outside and doesn't disappoint inside either, for the price I paid I think I have got a really good deal, because I still have all the product, with only the blusher not in its original form.

I've just looked on House of Fraser's website and they still have these palettes at 50% off, so if you like what you see you can order one now, but be warned they may be discounted because they are damaged.

Let me know if you have any Biba make-up and what you think of it in the comments below.

Once again thanks for taking the time to read this.

Love Jude x