Hey Beauties!
When I saw promo photos of Essence Limited Edition Wake Up, Spring! I immediately noticed pastel eyeliners. The shades looked so pretty. It's really hard to get a hold of colorful eyeliners in our drugstores, even more so to find a white one. Obviously I couldn't just take one shade, so I got all three.
Eyeliners come in a pen like shape. They all have colored packaging that corresponds the shade inside. Each costs 2.19€ and in it is 1 ml of product.
It has a foam tip applicator, which is the first problem. I have all three shades and the tip on all of those just doesn't get saturated enough. White one gets saturated the most, while lavender the least. You can see that there is still product in the pen, but it doesn't want to come down to the tip. I actually had such a hard time working with lavender shade that I bent the tip to almost break it and at that point the product was coming out from that point of breaking it. I then applied it on my hand and with a tip on my eyes. Since then I store them down wards and they work a bit better.
Eyeliners come in three shades 01 happy first day of spring is cool lavender shade, 02 let's the spring begin is white and 03 spring a-ling a-ling is retro minty green. All the shades are fairy light pastels.
The formula of these is like a milky cream which needs a bit of time to dry down completely. It doesn't move once it sets, but if it gets in contact with water, it will come off. I also find them a bit sticky, so you definitely need to use some sort of eye primer, if you're eyelids are a bit droopy.
The pigmentation is also not as good as I would expect. It depends from shade to shade. I find that white and lavender are more pigmented, while I always struggle to build up intensity with minty green. You need to go over the line multiple times to get the full color payoff. If you press the tip down too much you also get an uneven application. For some reason this eyeliner just doesn't work when I apply it over eye shadows. It's like the tip gets dirty with the eye shadow and doesn't want to perform. I really dislike this. It's obvious that I'm gonna apply it over eye shadow.
I also applied all three shades with different eye makeup to show you how they look like on me.
01 happy first day of spring
Pastel lavender shade is my favorite of all three, but it performs the worst. When I tried it at home it almost seemed like it was already a bit dried up. I might have picked the wrong one up in the shop. The tip doesn't want to get saturated. It took some real effort to make it look like it's OK. When I used it for the second time it worked better, because I had it stored down.
02 let's the spring begin
White performs the best. It's the only shade that the tip actually gets saturated, although it's less pigmented, because it's the lightest. White is great for creating double wings, 60's inspired makeup or just adding the light on your eyes.
03 spring a-ling a-ling
This retro minty green also doesn't get saturated enough, but performs a tad better than lavender, although it's less pigmented. I am a bit on the fence when it comes to the shade. It's unique, but I would almost like it to be a bit brighter.
Obviously you can wear these as an eyeliner on its own - even though they are very light, but my eyes just look very tired without some kind of dark color around the lash line, since my eye color is pretty dark. But you can also use it as I did, just slightly above the black liner. It almost creates colorful shade.
Here I also used all three of them together. It's a bit difficult to go over them with black liner, because the texture gets pretty thick. But you can definitely make it work with patience and precision.
I am disappointed by these eyeliner pens. The shades are unique and I love the milky finish, but it seems like Essence didn't put much effort into the performance. The tip doesn't get saturated enough and it's really hard to work with on top of eye shadows. If this was maybe in a gel form or liquid with a brush, I'm sure it would work better. I wouldn't recommend these. But if you'd still like to get these colorful eyeliners for whatever reason, I would say store them downwards and check in the store that they haven't been opened yet.
