This is US Indie brand founded by 3 sisters who want to provide colorful and affordable makeup to everyone. It was part of their trilogy collection that dropped in 2018, and I bought it sometime last year. Exotic Peacock was designed by Michelle, one of the co-owners of the brand. She was inspired by the "Waiting for Tonight" video by J. Lo because of the colors and included all her favorite colors into this palette. Can't say she did a bad job either.
I used this palette quite a few times in the past, and I thought to write a review on this since Pinky Rose is one of my favorite indie brands. I think both this brand and this palette extremely underrated, so here's my little contribution to getting them noticed.
The Palette
Michelle's inspiration resulted in a gorgeous palette full of tones that resemble the colorful plumage of a male peacock. The shade names are also after how Michelle feels when she wears them, so they're not just random names that were thrown into this palette. There are 8 matte shades and 6 metallic shades. If you love cool-toned shadows, this palette will really give you something new to work with:
It's pretty rare to find palettes that have are mostly just of blues, teals, violets, fuchsias, and greens. Most of the time, you'd find these colors in straight-up rainbow palettes. So the Exotic Peacock stands out a lot for that reason. Before I go in-depth into the eyeshadows, I will point out that while Pinky Rose is a cruelty-free brand, this particular product is not vegan. This means that some of the ingredients are animal-derived (Magnesium stearate).
The Shadows
I will say that these eyeshadows might not feel like anything special or unique when you're swatching them or applying them with your fingers. Here are the swatches of the first row, all done on bare skin with no base or sweat:
As you can see above, this is the row with the only neutral shades in this palette. You can come up with a more conservative and work-appropriate look with this palette if you wanted too, especially if you happen to be on the tanner or more ebony side of skin tones. Here is the second row:
The mattes are soft and not too firmly pressed in the pan but they're pigmented and blend and layer well with each other. I also found some inconsistencies with the metallic shades, some of them are sheer and need a bit of building up (Peacock and Provocative). While some of them are crumbly. I didn't notice any fading or fallout on my face despite these issues though.
My Final Thoughts
I enjoyed using this palette because it really pushed me to come up with different looks for colors that I wasn't really used to using. I also think that if you happen to have more cool-toned skin, this palette will really go with your complexion. Moreover, this palette can work for different skin tones because there a lot of really vivid and rich jewel tones included here.
I will say that one downside to using this palette is that it doesn't give you too much variety as you have a lot of cool-toned mattes that are quite dark with a few pastel and rich metallic tones. I tend to use a lot of eyeshadows for a single eye look so I did find that a lot of my eye looks ended up looking a bit similar to each other.
I don't find that this is an issue but I don't think this palette is very beginner-friendly and is better for people who have more skills in making creative and complicated eye looks. For that reason, you might not come up with a huge spectrum of looks. But still, I still enjoyed using this palette because of the quality of the shadows, the colors, and the looks that I came up with.
Where to get them:
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