My Sleek Acid palette came!

A while ago, I tweeted that The Hubz scored me a Sleek Acid palette on Ebay. Well, it finally got here and, despite being up to my eye-balls in dirty diapers and dishes and laundry (gross, I know), I HAD to make time to do some swatches!

Of course, my camera had a melt-down in the face of all the fluorescence, so the pics show the shadows only about half as neon as they are in person...

palette outdoors natural light no flash

palette indoors natural light no flash

See how the camera, coupled with my lack of photography skills just sucks all the awesome right out of these? The indoor shot shows how these shadows glow a little better but seriously, in person, these shadows GLOW, like you half expect them to be frickin radioactive & hot to the touch or something.

Swatch of the top row outdoors in the shade. Column 1 is no primer, column 2 is over NYX HD eyeshadow base.

Outdoors in the sun.

indoors.

The indoor shot gives you a better idea of how bright these are in real life--it's 1980s neon all over my arm. Now I'm not gonna lie. These shadows were a pain in the butt to work with. With the exception of the 2 blue shades, which are both shimmers, the other 4 (orange, yellow and white matte and pearly magenta) shades are pretty stiff and it took some work to build them up to the opacity you see on my arm. But, if neon shadows are anything like neon polishes (which are notoriously hard to work with), then I guess it could have been much worse. I do have to say I WAS able to get all  shades in this row to look pretty much the same as they do in the pan. Well, except for that white shade, which was pretty much useless but, honestly, I didn't want this palette for the white, so I don't really care if it is good or not. 

Swatches of 2nd row of shadows--can you guess which ones are over primer and which ones are not?

The second row of shadows had a lot of the same issues that the first row has: the stiffness and the heavy application required to get the color to look like it does in the pan. The hot pink shade in particular is insanely hard. I basically had to scrape and rake the brush over it to get any color out of it and although it is a vibrant neon pink in the pan, it looks deeper and less neon on the skin--which was a major disappointment for me. The purple, pink, and bright green are all matte while the army green has a slight pearlyness to it and the silver is a shimmer. All the shimmers in this palette are much easier to work with--but that is usually the case with most shadows as far as I've experienced, so I'm not going to take points off for that...

Over all, I'm glad to have this palette in my collection. I simply have never seen shadows this bright. The neon orange, yellow and green alone are worth owning this palette for--also the pearly magenta shade is really gorgeous and the shimmery blues are nice too. Really, the only true duds are the white and the hot pink shades but I have other whites and hot pinks in other palettes so I can deal with the ones in this palette sucking. Also, I haven't tried using these shadows for a look, so I can't form a full opinion on them just yet...

If you want this palette in the US, you'll have to get a friend overseas to hook you up or you can do like my husband did and snatch one off Ebay. So far as I know, though the Sleek cosmetics company DOES have a website and does have international shipping, they cannot ship this particular palette to the US because it contains some fluorescent pigments that are not approved by the FDA here (please feel free to correct me if I am wrong)...I don't know about you, but I kinda like the idea of having a little bit of contraband in my makeup stash. Now lets see if the FDA police come a'knockin on my door to snatch my Sleek away...