Review & Controversy: Glamour Doll Eyes

I was given free mini jars of Glamour Doll Eyes shadows and asked for a surprise selection of fun colours. 

Since I didn't do any ordering, I can't comment much on customer service except to say that Vee is really sweet and friendly. 

Packaging-wise, they're pretty and I love how they come with waterproof labels and were shrink-wrapped.

Here's the fill level for the jars I got:

The lids show off the shifts!

Anyway, on to swatches!

Macro shots on Darling Girl's glitter glue:

Glitter glue swatches side by side:

So gorgeous! Vee definitely picked out the perfect colours for me, because I'm crazy over these crazy bright colours!

On Urban Decay's Primer Potion:

The difference between Grenade & Sex Appeal is more obvious here.

Yup...they significantly became more "bald".

Foiled with a wet brush:

Sorry for the messy swatches. This was the first swatch I did after returning from my trip and somehow, the humidity killed my tape and colours ended up seeping through. I noticed these are really hard to foil with water though. And yes, Grenade ended up a different colour, which I thought was so freaking cool! This is why I love foiling!

Bare skin swatches:

This is the surprising part. Dirty Jeans is an unblended pigments yet it stays on ok. I was expecting way more fall out but it's pretty adhesive so I checked their ingredients list as well as their definition of "unblended"pigments to see what they mean. This is what GDE says about their unblended pigments:

Screenshot taken on 18 Aug, 2014

I'm glad GDE is open and honest when it comes to mentioning that they do use unblended pigments. And great, they do add other stuff into their eyeshadows to make it easier to work with. I checked the ingredients and I can't figure out how they adhere so well to bare skin, since this is their ingredient list:

Besides titanium dioxide, I see nothing else to add adhesion, and usually titanium dioxide barely cuts it for adhesion. The eyeshadow is also not streaky, and I don't see anything like silica to add slip. If anyone knows how this magic's possible, let me know. I emailed Vee about it and this is her reply:

So here are the ingredients for the eyeshadows I tried, if anyone can help me figure out the mystery, that'll be great. Bolded are the non-colour items.

• Avant-Garde: Pigment Violet, Mica, Titanium Dioxide, Tin Oxide, Synthetic Fluorophylogopite, Silica, Iron Oxide

• Burlesque: Manganese Violet (Pigment Violet 16), Iron Oxide, Mica, Titanium Dioxide, Tin Oxide, Calcium Aluminum Borosilicate, Silica

• Coquette: Titanium Dioxide, Mica, Magnesium Stearate, Pigment Violet, Tin Oxide, Synthetic Fluorophylogopite, Silica

• Dirty Jeans: Mica, Titanium Dioxide, Iron Oxide, Ferric Ferrocyanide

• Grenade: Mica, Iron Oxide, Titanium Dioxide, Blue #1 Al Lake, Yellow #5 Al Lake, Hydrogenated Polyisobutene, Palmitic Acid, Tin Oxide, Ferric Ferrocyanide, Calcium Aluminum Borosilicate, Silica

• Sex Appeal: Manganese Violet (Pigment Violet 16), Mica, Titanium Dioxide, Yellow #5, Blue #1, Palmitic Acid

As a comparison, here are typical ingredient lists for other companies (there's more than 3 but I didn't want to do an overkill...Dawn Eyes adhere best to bare skin, but her website's messy) that has eyeshadows that adhere well to bare skin:

Notoriously Morbid

• Bad Juju: Mica, titanium dioxide, carmine, iron oxide, ultramarine, magnesium stearate
• 
  
• Cry Innocent: Magnesium myristrate, mica, carnauba wax, iron oxide, titanium dioxide, ferric ferrocyanide, tin oxide

Daisy Bird Cosmetics

• Hello Hyacinth: Titanium dioxide, ultramarines, mica, carnauba wax, iron oxide, ferric ferrocyanide, Magnesium Myristate, tin oxide, carmine
• 
  
• Dandy Dandelion: Titanium dioxide, mica, carnauba wax, iron oxide, magnesium myristate

Backstreet Makeup Co

• (thirsty) Thursday: Mica, Boron Nitrate, Magnesium Stearate, Magnesium Myristrate, Iron Oxides, Silica, Titanium Dioxide, and Tin Oxide
• 
  
• Olivine: Mica, Boron Nitrate, Iron Oxides, Silica, Titanium Dioxide, Tin Oxide, Magnesium Stearate, Magnesium Myristrate

Anyway, here's some looks I did with their eyeshadows:

Cut creases aren't the most flattering on monolids, but it's the best way to show off many colours.

As you can tell, I stopped caring at the parts of my eyeliner that'll be hidden under my lids...

How my monolids normally look...

I tried out a powder foundation and it flaked on my dry patches. So sorry about that...

Product List:

Eyes

• GDE
• Avant-Garde (sides of "crease")
• Coquette (middle of "crease")
• Sex Appeal (shading above "crease")
• Dirty Jeans (lower lash line)
• Müse gold eyeshadow (inner corners)
• Maybelline Falsies mascara
• Fiberwig mascara

Face

• Biore Perfect Face Milk
• Dreamworld Hermetica foundation (Thetys II mixed with Nimue I)
• Revlon blush (mixed several blushes together)

Lips

• Müse customized colour

Once I applied it on my eyes and started blending, I started seeing the difference. As you can see from the pic, the eyeshadow went "bald" and a lot of the gorgeous glitter was gone.

UPDATE: Someone more familiar with ingredients informed me that some TKB Trading micas are pretty clingy on their own (which means nice swatch pics). You still need a base though, since they start wanting to come off when you apply it and start blending.

UPDATE: GDE plans on removing unblended pigments in the future:

UPDATE: GDE has officially removed unblended pigments from their site....but most of their eyeshadows still contain no bases. For a guide to help you identify if your eyeshadows contain any bases, you can head here. For a comparison of pure mica against micas with a base to show you what bases do, you can head here. For a review on how pure micas perform on their own, you can head here.