WANTED! Reward offered for the capture of the new NARS NARSissist Wanted Cheek Palette I, which may or may not have fallen between the cushions of my couch.
This bad boy is $59 and one of two new LE NARSissist Wanted blush palettes to launch with the new NARSissist Wanted Power Pack Lip Kits. It comes with six 0.13-oz. pans of powder blush, which are just sliiiightly smaller than regular full-size 0.16-oz. NARS blush pans.
Four of them are mattes, and two are shimmers.
Now for the really good news: 🙂 Only one of the shades is a re-promote — shimmery candy pink Bumpy Ride. The other five colors are LE.
Of the two Wanted Cheek Palettes, this one, v. 1, is the lighter option, and while its raison d’être is to kiss the cheeks of lasses with light and medium skin tones, I also like it for brown skin because it’s so easy to wear, on account of the mid-toned shades, which means that I can apply them half-asleep using a regular blush brush… Because they don’t look too intense or deep on me, I don’t have to overthink the application.
NARS gets REALLY high marks from me for the mattes, which have had their powder grains whittled down to almost microscopic size, so the blushes look like someone painted pure color on my cheeks. No powdery residue at all! They’re all beautiful on bare skin, too, but matte coral Buzzed and matte rose Kingpin are my faves. I think they’re the most wearable of the six shades.
I was surprised to see that matte lavender Notorious shows up on my skin because it looks so pale in the pan, but the high pigment helps.
Actually, all six blushes in this palette are quite pigmented, now that I think about it, and yet still easy to wear, even on medium and deeper skin tones. Notorious is a cool-toned lavender and isn’t excessively blue, so even if you have a warm skin tone (like I do), it doesn’t look too jarring. In fact, it’s shockingly cute. It has juuust enough contrast.
Matte bright coral Crave makes a dark, intense (and perhaps borderline scary!) first impression in its pan, but if you use a light touch and a blush brush to apply it to your cheeks, they’ll look like you just sprinted a mile…except without the elevated heart rate and all the sweat, LOL!
As for shimmery pale pink Unlimited, it looks almost dewy. Applied carefully and conservatively with a blush brush, it looks like one of the awesome Hourglass Ambient Highlighting Powders.
Applied more heavily, though, it quickly goes full-on Instagram highlight (a.k.a. it’s super frosty). So pull back with this one. I like it as a highlighter. In small doses.
And then there’s shimmery candy pink Bumpy Ride, which isn’t as shimmery as Unlimited. Now, I’m not normally a shimmery blush person…but I like Bumpy Ride. It’s just barely shimmery. I wouldn’t even call it shiny.
Overall, I dig this palette, especially the mattes. If someone told me that I could only use one cheek palette for a month, and it had to be this one, I wouldn’t feel like I was missing something. I’m a fan!
It’s available now on the Ulta website (and coming March 18th to Ulta stores), and arrives at NARS boutiques and the NARS website on March 15th.
Your friendly neighborhood beauty addict,
Karen
P.S. Happy hump day!!! 🙂
