Cargo Cosmetics Nude Beach Eye Shadow Palette

This week’s eyeshadow palette was the Cargo Nude Beach Eyeshadow Palette.  It came to me in August’s BoxyCharm.  If you read the post you may remember I wasn’t terribly thrilled with it.  I was hoping for a different palette. But I have several Cargo Palettes in my collection and in general the formula is usually pretty good.I will aslo say that when I went looking for more information on this palette, I found it offered for sale on Poshmark but not on the Cargo site so I think it may be discontinued. The only Nude Beach I really found in eyeshadow was from the Balm. (that palette by the way is pretty good).

I would also suggest that if searching for anything named Nude Beach you definitely add the words eyeshadow palette to the name before searching as eyeshadow isn’t the first thing that the computer will show you. Just a handy tip for searching.

Starting with the positives, the formula for the shadows is really nice. It applies well, stays on the lids with only minor creasing throughout the day and is decently pigmented and tends to blend well.

It is however a very boring palette. To be completely honest, almost every look I tried came out more or less the same.  The shadows themselves are nice.  But the choice when applying them is do you want a light smokey/neutral eye or a darker smokey/neutral eye? 

There are two shimmers in the palette, one silver and one gold. They are both buttery soft, apply well with either brush or finger and generally stay where you put them with little fall out.  They too are good shadows. If there were more colors in the palette, I would actually be content with them being the only shimmers in the palette.

But alas, there are not.

I know this is a somewhat short review, but truthfully there isn’t much to tell.  The shadows are a good formula.  The selection is boring and you end up with little variation in the looks you can create with them. 

Perhaps a trained makeup artist could work a miraculous array of looks, but no matter what I tried it was either darker or lighter and either silver or gold, but looking virtually the same. Don’t get me wrong it was a nice look and I will keep this around for a quick neutral look, but if I were going to use this as my sole palette for a week again, I would add at least one or two single shadows to the makeup bag to give myself a little variation.

To be fair, with a couple of shadows to add color this would be a really good palette to use for office work. And if you worked in an office where a neutral look was all that could be used it would make a good work day palette. The shadows are quality and as there is really very little variation, it is super quick to use. Little thinking is needed. However like I said at the beginning, when I went to look it up, I couldn’t find it listed on the Cargo Cosmetics site, which leads me to believe this is a discontinued item and that even Cargo realized it was too boring to sell well.

---