The Meaningless, Empty and Futile quest for cream eyeshadows...

I took full advantage of the Mark brochure's recent/current B2G1 sale and bought a few of their Hook-Ups. Last week when my Avon lady showed up she said she was sorting through her order and she kept finding all these little tiny boxes..."Oh, that's for the Apprentice!".

At any rate. Something I'd been wondering about for quite a while now are their Mini Mark-It sticks. Basically, short and fat pencils that slide into a little Hook-Up cap. They have them for both lips and eyes but only the eye pencils were in the last brochure. None of the colours were particularly striking to me except for Cocoa Bean (my dog Cocoa likes to roam...one day Cocoa left his home...) which looked like a very nice brown.

At this point I will have to intercept my own post with a rant. Since day one of my interest in the cosmetics world, I have been inexplicably drawn to cream eyeshadows. I really couldn't tell you why. They expire faster than anything else. They crease after under an hour of wear. They're harder to find, usually have a terrible texture, don't blend well, and often are more expensive than a powder. But for some reason there is a definite attraction, and on more than one occasion I have tossed all logic aside and caved. Perhaps it's the light texture, or that you don't need a brush, or visions of bright dewy-looking lids. No clue.

But has my search been successful? No, no, and furthermore NO. Any cream I've ever tried has gone on sheer, blended poorly, and ended up an oily mess in my eye crease mere minutes later. My one exception are liquid-to-powders, which I really must expound on in a later post. They're not really cream eyeshadows at all, but seem to be lumped into the same category.

I had actually tried Mark's Winksticks previously. Similar idea, a stick of eye colour, but these are retractable whereas their new Mark-Its are a pencil which must be sharpened. The Winkstick had virtually no pigment laydown, and as per the usual, creased nearly instantly.

Finally I visited my dear old friend Makeupalley and discovered that while the Winksticks had terrible ratings (surprise surprise!), the Mark-Its had some rather stellar reviews. I figured by 2010 the cosmetic world must finally have formulated cream eyeshadows correctly and it was worth a shot.

Unfortunately, while the application was smooth and the product didn't feel oily at all--in fact, there was even a sufficient amount of pigment--Mini Mark-It sticks undergo the inevitable and crease, as have anything else I've ever tried. Bah, humbug. I even tried setting the product with powder, to no avail.

I will be keeping this around, because it really is a lovely colour and will be quite convenient for my makeup bag which I tote around in my knapsack. I don't think it'll be a problem using this product lightly around my eyes, but I would definitely avoid going anywhere near a full lid application or near the crease.