What it is: Quo‘s Minerals Matter eyeshadow quad, in Downtown Brown. Just as a heads-up, keep in mind that the shadows on the SDM/Quo site are way off.
The shadows: Soft and pigmented, just as they should be! I actually picked this out with a friend in Quebec so I could do a couple neutral looks on her (and some of our other friends,) and told her that if she didn’t want to take it home at the end, I would. I no longer have this, so I guess that says something, right? :P
In comparison to the rest of the drugstore neutrals that we swatched, these shadows are stellar. A lot of people love the Maybelline quads, so I swatched their neutral to compare this one to — in short, the Quo palette blew the Maybelline one right out of the water! No, they don’t swatch very true to colour, but they do swatch very nicely.
A good way to describe the shadows may be this: they’re better than most drugstore shadows, and on par with some mid-range ones, but not quite the calibre of high-end ones. And, I mean, the quad is priced accordingly, so I can’t complain!
Macro shots of the shadows. These correspond to the swatches later on in the post.
Ingredients:
Mica, ethylhexyl palmate, zinc stearate, kaolin, phenoxyethanol, sodium dehydroacetate, tocopherol, ascorbyl palmitate. May contain mica, titanium dioxide, iron oxides, CI 75470, CI 77288, CI 77007, CI 77742, CI77510.
The shades:
Hey, do we find these swatch boxes helpful? It’s the same image as below, but… in boxes.
A touch warmer/more bronze than I wanted them to be, but overall it’s a great daytime neutrals quad. Starting in the top left and moving clockwise, there’s a nice hilight colour (it’s like an apricot-champage,) a bronzey medium brown, a darker brown with reddish undertones, and another (more sheer) medium brown.
The verdict? If you’re looking for a neturals quad, you’re in Canada, and you’re happy with netural-warm shadows, this is a great buy at $16 per quad (if I remember correctly.) Quo goes on sale often, too! You can’t create anything super-dramatic with this, obviously, but it’s gorgeous and definitely suitable for office wear.
