Cle de Peau Eye Color Quad in Kyanite Swatches, Photos, Review

Aaaand I'm back! Let's just say taking a one-day trip to Boston and coming back to NYC the next day and then going straight to work isn't the breeziest walk in the park. I woke up after a nine-hour deep sleep feeling like my back didn't even touch the bed. I must be getting old.

On to my Serious Blogging Duties. The good thing about my whirlwind (ha!) trip is I thought about a whole category of items to blog about. In the next couple of months I will be doing a fair amount of traveling, so why not start rooting around the stash for suitable items to go into that teeny little makeup bag? (I use a tiny one on purpose. Obviously if given a choice I would lug my entire vanity, but that would prove to be heavier than my shoe collection.)

One of my travel makeup stalwarts is the Cle de Peau Eye Color Quad in Kyanite ($55). It is literally the only palette in my drawer with a used sponge brush, which should serve as a measure of what a serious travel buddy this is. 

Cle de Peau Kyanite

Swatched left to right

I urge myself to leave incoherent gushing and spontaneous "omg loves" to my Twitter account, but I was so so close to oozing out all my love for this palette in blubberspeak for this post. The eyeshadows in this quad are so finely milled I gasped the first time I played with it at the counter and had to restrain myself from constantly touching it when I brought it back home. 

In my look above, I used the white gold shade as an all over wash, followed by the silver shade around the inner corners. Then, I swept a little of the blue from the outer corner to about the center of my lid, and deepened my crease with the brown shade.

I hate to dump a cliche on you, but the shadows in Kyanite blend like an absolute dream. This palette is just so smooth. When applied on the eye, it loses some of the sheen you see in the arm swatch. But I prefer it this way since I use Kyanite for my job interview aka "appropriate" makeup. I'll go one step further and call them "grown up" quads. I do feel an extra boost of sophistication and posh when I put these colors on myself. 

The Cle de Peau Eye Color Quads are the only palettes I've ever considered owning the entire collection. Take a look at them here and tell me if you can resist! That picture is a true to color depiction of most of the quads in this line.

The one (and possibly only) downside to these quads are the high price point. Cle de Peau prices the quads at $55 and sells the case separately for $25, so it amounts to $80 for what seems to be very little product. I purchased Kyanite with a case because I knew from the get-go that I will be traveling with it, but I opted out of one when I got Thulite. The quad alone is housed in a sturdy plastic case that serves well enough if it only has to sit at your vanity table. While I think $25 for the case is quite outrageous, it's worth mentioning that the brush that comes in the quad is amazing. I have no qualms leaving behind my full-sized brushes when I know I have that in my bag.