NYX Illuminator (REVIEW)

I tried picking up the Urban Decay highlighter in Aura, which is a beautiful muted pink-y lilac with a gold duo-chrome, but it was out of stock everywhere. As I am so impatient and wanted a new highlighter as the one I have doesn’t really do it for me anymore, I picked up the NYX Illuminator in the shade Enigmatic IBB05 and it’s a gorgeous pink shade in the pan, but has a really pretty hint of gold on the cheek bones. Most drugstore highlighters are all glitter and can emphasize pores and skin texture badly, so I wanted to see if these did the same. It comes with 9.5g (0.33oz) and has pretty sturdy packaging with a big mirror. Also, the lettering on the packaging is written in the colour of the highlighter so if you were planning on getting multiple and storing them in your collection, you’d be able to see the shade just by looking at the lid.

I sprayed my brush with the NYX setting spray and it made it so much more intense and it really brings out the golden duo-chrome  feature of this product. Also, it reflects more light which I think looks amazing, especially since it’s “supposedly” summer here in England. To get the most pigmentation that I could, I used a dense “jumbo eyeshadow brush” from Royal which applies it amazingly. The product slightly sinks into pores but not too much as you can tell by the swatches and does kick up excess product.

I didn’t use a smoothing primer as I wanted to see how it would perform on its own. On the first application, it looked amazing. The pigmentation was just as good as it’s high-end duplicate, the product glowed rather than sparkled like in other highlighters due to overuse of glitter like and was overall a good product. The longevity of the product wasn’t that great but that is normal on my skin. Also, it doesn’t state that on the packaging or on the box so I didn’t want to judge it too harshly on that factor. After 10 hours, the product has faded significantly, but not completely. The pigmentation seemed to have faded and left bits of glitter, which was not as visible before. To make it a fair test, I tried it with a primer the next day and repeated the same steps. It lasted a little better after 10 hours but not massively.

Overall, I think that this is a great highlighter if you don’t want to spend loads on buying the Urban Decay one. I would recommend it 100%. However, I feel like I would like to splurge a little more money into something more expensive that is advertised as being long lasting as I feel like that would last better on my skin.

Originally posted on: https://lipstickandpaintbrushes.co.uk/

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