Contour kits have been around for some years now, but for some reason they seem to be especially popular in summer. I figure it must be because everyone is trying to give themselves a tan or the illusion of lost winter weight. LOL! That, and the fact that a lot of summer colours are often perceived to look better with a tan or contoured face. Anyway, like bronzing, contouring is another of those things I don't normally do, primarily because I'm just too lazy. But since there are people interested in contouring, why not? And the most accessible and cheapest contour kits are the Sleek Contour Palettes, which I'll be swatching today.
A good contour palette is hard to find, primarily because a lot of companies assume people don't know the difference between bronzing and contouring, and so produce a lot of contouring powders that are too shimmery. ARRGH THE HORROR. While I'm tolerant of shimmer in bronzers, I personally maintain that ideally, a good contour colour should be matte, especially if it's a darker-than-your-skin shade you're using to shade your face with. The reason is that the shade is supposed to to enhance your face's natural shape by creating the optical illusion of shadows, and noone I know of has a shimmery shadow.
Which is why I think that given their drugstore background, Sleek has done a pretty decent job of their Face Contour Palettes. These come in three colours - light, medium, and dark, and the lighter shade is a highlighter, which is shimmery and an approximation to what Sleek probably assumes the average skintone of their users might be, while the darker colour is a matte contouring powder. I actually thought these were eyeshadow duos when I first looked at them, LOL, and although I'm sure they can be used to that end, I'll just swatch them as contouring products.
Light is a set of a light pink-beige highlighter with a light brown matte contour powder.
Medium is a light orange highighter with a medium browm matte contour powder.
Dark is a tan shimmer highlighter with a dark brown matte contour powder.
Pigmentation on these was quite good, as you can see from swatches, which is why I thought they were eyeshadow duos at first! LOL! The texture was also not too shabby, it was like their powder blushes (which was one of my earliest swatches HERE, albeit in terrible lighting).
There isn't much else to comment on, what you see is what the colours pretty much are, although it's worth noting that the matte contour shades for the lighter colours are a bit more orange-based than the matte contour shades for the darker powders. The Light contour shade has the most amount of orange, while the Dark contour shade doesn't have much orange in it. This strikes me as weird, because for the highlight powders, it's the other way around - the darker the sets get, the more orange the highlight powders get. So it's like the undertones of the contouring powder and highlighting powder don't quite match up to me. But otherwise, I think they aren't too shabby overall, and definitely good value for money.
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Summer Contouring: Sleek Face Contour Palette Swatches
