An ‘Exquisite’ Mistake
Categorized with Magic Tricks • tagged with Bare Escentuals, salvage operation, yellow
Someone, hearing that I was interested in two of the colors from the Bare Escentuals Be Adventurous kit, offered to trade me for their unopened pot of Exquisite. So for the price of a few brushes that I wasn’t going to use - and postage - I got a pot of Exquisite.
It did not look the yellow-gold shown in the photos of the kit. It looked more like - forgive the indelicacy - baby-diarrhea yellow-brown. The same color as cheap “brown” mustard. And it was a “glimpse”, to boot - which means very little pigment. (Given the shade, that might be a good thing…) Since I have additives from TSS and jars of mica powder from Coastal Scents, I decided to see what I could to do salvage this.
I tried adding Violet Interfine, thinking that since purple is a complimentary color to yellow the result might look acceptable - kind of like Hot Spot (which I adore), but with a bit more brown. I didn’t measure, just mixed in a dollop. It did add a little bit of the interfine, and lightened the color so there wasn’t quite so much yellow visible; but it still wasn’t all that great. So I added a dollop of Sunstone - a darker golden-orange mica powder. While the color was no longer quite so disconcerting, there still wasn’t much effect. Not too surprising, since it was essentially a pot of mixed mica powders with a small amount of actual pigment in it. Applied wet, it adds an interesting glaze layer. While I don’t know that I’ll use this super-often, I can apply a thin layer over dark brown or black liner pencil and add a little flash to a given look - and I have managed to turn something that would have been pitched or forgotten, into something useful.
