abh – Byte of Beauty

I have always thought Anastasia Beverly Hills was a good brand, after all Anastasia Soare is the QUEEN of brows, but lately they have really been making me fall in love more and more. Claudia “Norvina” Soare, president of ABH and Anastasia’s daughter, has a keen eye for design and always has her finger to the pulse of trends. Moonchild is her brain child, born out of her childhood love for “The Neverending Story” and its bright and colorful visual palette. She also is a great person and makes a point of ensuring her line is inclusive of ALL genders and skin colors, something I applaud. Check out the promo shots below!

Product Information

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve undoubtedly noticed that the current makeup trends are all about bright, vivid, rainbow colors, from eyes, to lips, to even cheek bones. Moonchild is a 6-color rainbow highlighting palette featuring hues ranging from celestial pink to dazzling lavender. Each pan contains .15 oz of product, with .9 oz total in the product. Their 4-pan glow kits have 1.04 product, for reference. All ABH glow kits currently cost $40. The price breaks down to $6.67 per shade for this product.

What really sets this glow kit apart is its utilization of a proprietary cosmetic ingredient, Reflecks™, from BASF Care Creations, a cosmetic lab. BASF describes Reflecks™ as a color changing pigment that gives cosmetics vibrant life by changing their color as the visual angle of the viewer or the wearer shifts. This multi-dimensional effect material makes distinctive color travel effects possible through providing an array of optical effects that offer a pearl colored visual impact. Claudia noted that this ingredient is typically used in loose pigments, and this would be the first time the brand has experimented with utilizing it in a pressed product. Below are the brand descriptions of the shades:

Blue Ice- Diamond white with an icy blue reflect
Star- A moonstone fusion of mint, platinum, and silver reflect
Purple Horseshoe- A glittering lavender with an arctic blue reflect
Pink Heart- Pearl white with a pink opal reflect
Lucky Clover- A shamrock-infused gold with a canary yellow diamond reflect
Blue Moon- Frozen blue with a silver reflect

Swatches

Review

First off, aesthetically, the product itself is so stunning and visually appealing. I love the holographic packaging and the entire concept behind the palette and the marketing campaign. It appealed to me immediately, but I was concerned it would be something I couldn’t actually pull off in public. Au contraire, these are actually so beautiful on the face and are actually quit subtle! I have been using a fluffy highlight brush from Luxie, and find that it blends so nicely onto my face without being really crazy or looking like a line of color on my cheekbone or down my nose. These provide an almost celestial glow, and the color is so multi-dimensional, with the reflects changing with how the light hits the face. If you want it to really pop and show off the color, you can layer easily without over-emphasizing large pores or texture. They are also eye safe and make great overall eyelid colors for a glowing, ethereal look.

The texture is very luxurious. The are very soft and finely milled. The glitter is not chunky at all, and does not fall out all over the face. They also kick up very little dust in the pan itself, which can be a problem among powder highlights. The colors look great on my light skin, but as you can see from the promo pics, they also look absolutely stunning on darker skin, and I believe this is POC friendly.

My personal favorite is Purple Horseshoe. It is so pretty and looks like lavender fairy dust. It looks so pretty as a highlight on the cheekbones, and I find it to be just the right amount of glow and pigmentation to really work perfectly for me. My one complaint is that there are two blues, but I understand why they made that choice, as any warm colors would have looked out of place, and the shades are very different, not at all close to identical.

Overall I love this palette, and am so happy I got the guts to buy it. I am feeling more confident in wearing daring makeup looks and for some reason a poppin’ highlight gives me confidence like nothing else, so this is a perfect product for me to incorporate into my beauty routine. The colors are also subtle enough, and blend so well that they could easily be worn every day, especially Star and Pink Heart.

9/10

Anastasia Beverly Hills is an iconic brand built by Anastasia Soare, brow stylist to the stars. Along with her daughter Claudia “Norvina” Soare, these bad bitches have taken the makeup world by storm and no longer focus solely on brows. Their cosmetics line now includes liquid lipsticks and glosses, highlighters, liners, and complexion products coming soon! This is my first Anastasia eye shadow experience, but I had high hopes, as their shadows are raved about on social media.

This palette retails for $42 and is available on the Anastasia Beverly Hills website, along with Ulta and Sephora. It includes 14 colors, with each pan holding .02 oz of product. The eye shadow pans hold exactly half on the product that a normal MAC or Makeup Geek pan would hold. The price breaks down to exactly $3 per shadow, with the price per ounce EXACTLY the same as MUG and MAC! An amazing value, in my opinion. The palette also comes with a dual-sided shadow brush, with a blending brush on one end and a small duo-fiber shader on the other. The brush didn’t blow me away and I found the bristles on the blending brush a bit prickly. However, I think this brush would make it easy to do a full look with just the one brush, and for that I give ABH kudos.

Texture: Soft and buttery. Kicked up some powder in the pan, but I did not have an issue with fallout when applying them.

Pigmentation: Great color saturation. The shimmers and mattes are both pigmented and provide great color pay off. Only color that I had a bit of an issue with was Love Letter. It applied slightly patchy, but was able to be blended and looked fine on the eye.

Blendability: Great. Mattes blend like a dream and do not skip or show up patchy.

Color Selection: This is a well thought out palette. The reds, magentas, and oranges are romantic and fun, but the range of neutrals also make this a perfect every day palette. Wide selection of colors for the lid, crease, and brow bone. 8 mattes, 2 shimmers, and 4 micro shimmers. I love that it has more mattes than anything else, as this makes it so versatile and increases the usability exponentially!

Overall: A great quality palette and a good price. The value is there, as well as the quality I would expect from Anastasia. The looks you could create from this look are diverse and numerous, from grungy russet smokey eyes to neutral, every day natural looks. 4.5/5