L’Oréal Color Riche Eyeshadow (SMOKY- E5) Swatches

In the first, and hopefully the last episode of “blog drafts Mari prepared but never got to publish for years,” here’s a swatch post of L’Oréal’s Color Riche Eyeshadow quad. They sent this to me 4 years ago, and somehow, despite having a draft prepared 4 years ago, it just got stuck in the pipelines! Fast forward to today, it’s no longer available in the Philippines, but is still available in the US and some European countries, so I thought I’d publish these photos anyways.

This is very rare, so I really apologize to L’Oréal.

Anyways, these are the directions on the back portion of the packaging. The eyeshadow pans are placed in quite a straightforward manner, as they more or less mimic actual eyeshadow placement positions on the eyes.

Thankfully, the packaging is quite practical and this isn’t weirdly bulky like other eyeshadow offerings.

As seen here, the four shades for this quad include a pearl shade, a silver shade, a dark grey shimmer shade, and a gunmetal black shade. All of them are shimmery and/or metallic.

The main weakness of this quad is the packaging!… Like one week after having this, I just flipped the lid and it broke. I hope that when they phased this out and brought in their new quads, they changed the hinges and made them stronger. I really liked this eyeshadow quad as a whole, but was shocked that the packaging broke too soon.

The pearl and silver shades are very useful, as they can be used very extensively as inner corner illuminators / tear duct shimmer. The two shades can be used in any other eyeshadow look you wish to do, even if it’s not a smoky look you’re going for.

These eyeshadows are super pigmented, buttery, and have a good adherence to the skin. The collection as a whole is very advisable for people on the go as one need not waste time trying to get color to appear. These are easy to blend, so they are easy to work with, even for beginners.

The only “sad” part was that all of these shades are pearly or metallic. So in essence, if you had this, you’d definitely still need the help of an eyebrow powder or another eyeshadow palette to have a decent look. Using a fully shimmery metallic quad for a smoky look is not necessarily the best idea, so this is limited in that aspect. But as this is a quad from years back, they already did correct this when they brought in their Color Riche Pocket Palette quads, which already have matte shades in the quads. This is especially important for dark shades like black.