Cheap and Good? Skin Food Vitamin Eyeshadow

This is Part 2 of the Cheap and Good? eyeshadow series. If you missed my explanation of what this series is about, do read Part 1 on my review of Elianto Shimmer eyeshadow.

For my second experiment, I popped over to Skin Food to check out their stuff. Skin Food is a Korean cosmetics company and like many Korean mainstream cosmetics, happen to fall in the low-medium priced market. So again, the customers tend to be the young and those on a budget. Here’s the link to the Korean site and to the Singapore site for those who can’t read Korean.

I’ll be honest. These cutesy Korean brands don’t appeal to me. I chose Skin Food because of the cute factor and because I always see many people at their counters. I reckoned there must be something worth checking out there other than the fact that their prices are low. Skin Food did have a range of eyeshadows that fell in the below RM25 range and I was curious about how they fared. So, I picked up the Skin Food Vitamin Eyeshadow for about RM23 (I think).

You have to hand it to the Koreans though. They know how to package their product so it appeals! Skin Food’s Vitamin Eyeshadow comes in a compact with a large eyeshadow pan in it. The brand name and the signature little cherub is embossed on the surface of the shadow. How cute is that?

The colour I got is a lilac. There is a reason why I ended up with this colour. I was at the Skin Food kiosk in MidValley Megamall and saw that most of the colours available were just too sheer and too light and pastel. I was actually quite hard pressed to find a colour that would work for me and took so long to choose that the sales assistant thought I was trying to swipe something. No, seriously.

After dithering, I eventually picked up the lilac as the best one of the lot. There were other eyeshadow lines available. There were mousse and loose powder eyeshadows and 2 other pressed pan eyeshadows – Sugar Dessert eyeshadow and another I cannot recall off hand.

Though pretty, they were out of budget as they cost over RM25. Though the texture of these 2 were finer, the colours were also of the pastel variety and highly shimmery. If you are looking for a highlight colour, try looking in these lines. However, if what you want is colour, I’d say forget it.

Coming back to the Skin Food Vitamin Eyeshadow, here’s how it looks on my skin. As you can see, the colour is hardly lilac at all, just mostly shimmer. On my eyes, it totally disappeared and all I saw was white shimmer.

Quite nice for highlighting, but I already own lots of highlighting colours and did not need one more. Next to the RM5 Elianto shimmer eyeshadow, you can see how pale the colour is compared to what you see in the pan.

Needless to say, I did not like it one bit.

To be fair, some other shades like the orange was more pigmented. However, warm colours don’t work well on me, so I don’t wear them much.

The texture of the powder shadow is hard and it was not easy for me to pick up the colour. Bear in mind I use my fingers and it is usually easy to over do colours when using fingers. I tried with a brush and got even less colour.

So, cute packaging aside, I have nothing very good to say about Skin Food eyeshadows. Comparing Elianto and Skin Food, I’d say, go with Elianto eyeshadows if you are on a budget. For RM5 you can’t go far wrong. The Skin Food sugar dessert eyeshadows are expensive for highlighting colours but they are pretty so maybe go for that one for a highlighter.

I guess the powder eyeshadows aren’t Skin Food’s strong selling point.

UPDATE: Read Beetrice’s Review on the Skin Food Vitamin Eyeshadow and Bloop de Paris eyeshadow in this Cheap and Good? series.

Skin Food Vitamin Eyeshadow

Cheap [rating:4/5]

Good [rating:1/5]