Canmake is a drugstore brand of makeup hailing from Japan, the land of kawaii, anime, and unfortunately more recently, tragedy. The brand is known for its cutsey, girly packaging of products, and general glitter abundance in their products. Yup, glitter abundance. So if you love glitter, you'll love this brand. If you don't, this brand probably won't have too many items that would float your boat.
Proving my point very neatly are the Jewelstar Eyes Shimmery Cream Eyeshadow. These cream eyeshadows come in cute little compacts, which looks nice, but makes me worry a little bit about the product drying out in the packaging.
I guess Canmmake figured that for the Jewelstar range, the "jewel" and "star" effect could be acheive by stuffing the shadows with glitter. Big, big bits of chunky, discrete glitter. The glitter colour varies with the individual shadow colour, but typical glitters would be gold or silver. Some of the shades have pink glitter.
In addition to being glitter-filled, these shadows are sheer. I had to dig out a lot of product to build up the colour. So yes, they are sheer, and glittery, and if you used them layered thinly as normal cream shadows, you'd probably have a bunch of coloured glitter and not much actual pigmentation.
Here are swatches of the entire range. You'd better appreciate them, because I was walking around with a glittery arm afterwards. I just couldn't get the glitter off!
01 Crystal Silver is a sheer, white-silver-ish base with big bits of silver glitter.
02 Zircon Blue is a sheer sky blue, with blue and silver glitter.
03 Lime Green is a pale, pastel green that is hardly lime at all. Also sheer, and laden with silver glitter.
04 Chandelier Pink is a sheer, pastel baby pink. Has silver glitter, and I think some pink glitter too.
05 Mirror Purple would be the kind of colour I'd wear, if I liked sheer, glittery shadows. (Regular readers would probably know this isn't my cup of tea.) Pastel, cool-toned purple, with lots of silver and pink-ish glitter.
06 Pearl Brown is a medium warm brown. Canmake describes it as a "deep brown", but to me it's more medium than deep. Has gold shimmer. This one actually had better pigmentation than the rest of the colours, and could be built up, although it's still on the sheer side.
07 Stone Gold is a pale, sheer, shimmery champagne. I detect gold and silver glitter in this one.
08 Illumination Nude should be called Illumination Pink, in my opinion. I hardly think that glitter-laden pink colour is a nude on anyone's skintone. It's a sheer peachy-pink shade, kind of like NARS Orgasm, but in sheer, cream eyeshadow form. With tons of gold and silver glitter.
One last thing about the Jewelstar Eyes shadows is that they have this weird, slippery, slide-y, silicone-y feel that usually comes about when a product is formulated with lots of silicones. It makes me feel like they skimped out on pigment and topped up the product with silicones instead, but at least it spreads nicely on the skin. And this type of sheer, glittery, silicone-y formulation seems popular in the Asian market for some reason, even though it's not to my personal taste.
So, would I recommend these? Personally, I'm not convinced, because the glitter in them is too OTT, the pigmentation too sheer, and because I don't like the silicone-y feel in my cream products. And, the compact packaging makes me worry about my shadows drying out too fast. But if you're looking for sheer shimmery cream shadows with kawaii packaging, if you don't mind glitter, or if you're really into Asian makeup, this is worth looking into.
