Beauty Bay Retro love palette review

Hey everyone ! I’ve been testing this out for a few days and wanted to finally do an in-depth review of the Beauty Bay Retro Love palette.  As I posted earlier in the sneak peek, it was a tough choice between this palette and the Juvia’s Place Candy Shop palette. Both are really nice pastel color stories , but I liked the color selection of Retro Love a little better. Plus the packaging is really nice . I love the hearts , the colors plus the cardboard is very sturdy. 

It also comes with a really nice mirror too. And why is it with every palette that comes with a mirror I refuse to peel off the protector? I still have the protective screen on my Too Faced Pumpkin Spice and Huda Mercury Retrograde palettes. 

And here’s the colors ! This is without flash , but you can see all the mattes look really nice and bright, you can even tell the texture as well. The top part of the palette is probably my favorite with the greens , blues and purples. But the bottom half is also really nice , I like the addition of the peachy pink, the coral shimmer and the mauve.Plus a yellow too !

And here’s the flash ! You can now see the way the shimmers sparkle ! I really love the wet look of the blues . Although My Girl and Be My Baby are very eye catching as well.

So now we’re going to go ahead and do the swatches. This part was a bit tough as HeartBreak Hotel (the nice mint , Blue Suede ( the blue ) and L-O-V-E were a bit hard to swatch. They’re very pastel, more so than any other shades in my current collection. So definitely use a white sticky base to get these to show up. I was able to go back over my arm swatches to build up though.

So for the first set of swatches I did the blues and purples:

No Flash:

The white was also pretty hard to swatch too, It’s buidable but needs that white sticky base to really stick to skin. Also Moon River looks super dark here but you can still see the shimmer in the shadow. The darker blue matte was pretty easy and pigmented to swatch as well. It Takes Two (the charcoal) looks more warm here than in the pans.

Now with flash:

So here we get to see the shimmer’s really shine ! Moon River is beautiful, as is My Girl and River Deep. Love Train is definitely more of a topper shade but it’s still gorgeous .The pastels are a bit ashy ,and I’ll be one of the first to criticize them as they were some of the reasons I was drawn to this palette.

Now for the bottom half :

No Flash:

The coral peach was a bit harder to swatch but it built up , now on the eyes the brown and burgundy shades were a little harder to blend out. They’re pretty pigmented but just hard to blend, not impossible though. Also the shimmers here are really nice , with my favorite being Be My Baby. 

Now with flash:

I think Good Vibrations works best as a topper shade or inner corner , but it’s still really pretty as is the gold champagne color. 

And now for the eye looks :

Cotton Candy 

This was my first time trying it out and I used this for my sneak peek post. I wanted to do kind of color melt and use the brighter pinks as the outer shades. Now some people believe you have to have a darker corner in the V , but sometimes I just don’t want to do that . I was especially Impressed with River Deep! it’s such an amazing blue shade and I can justify buying this palette just for the beautiful blue. The shades I used were Cupid , L-O-V-E,  Blue Suede, River Deep, and Love Train for the top part. MAgic Moment and Cupid blended for the bottom . Oh and brow bone shades were Chapel of Love and Love Me Do. They’re both pretty sheer .

All of this was done on a white base. I used the Nyx Jumbo liner in Milk and also some glitter glue to really keep the shimmer in place.

Next up is :Romantic mauves and peaches :

I wanted to go more soft but it still came out bright! I used At Last and blended that with Baby Love, for the V and bottom of my eyes I used Can’t Hurry Love. This shade was tricky as it’s a bit harder to blend out . It looked kind of messy before I added the wing. While I loved the color I wish it was a bit more blendable . Also Love Me do was used as the brow bone shade , Be My Baby was the main shimmer , with Good Vibrations being my inner corner shade. The shimmers are all fantastic in this palette! Just some of the mattes are harder to work with. Not impossible but harder than say Juvia’s Place or even some of my Too Faced shades.

Other side so you can see the glory of  Be My Baby.

No Smiling allowed with the Klee shirt.

Next look : Dark mermaid !

So this look I wanted to experiment a bit with. I used an unconvential green as outside shade along with magic Moment. I had to really keep going back and blend these out more. I still wasn’t happy with the up close pics , but further away it does look better. I also had some issues with It Takes Two , the charcoal shade. it blended out to nothing and other areas it was hard to blend out. I think if I do this look again I’ll use the charcoal shade in Juvia’s Place Wahala , as it’s such an easy to use shade compared to this . Chapel of love was used in the brow and My Girl was used in the main part of my eye.  With a tiny bit of Love Train in the inner corner.

It actually looks better on this eye lol. 

Lavender reverse smoked  look !

And feeling more experimental , I wanted to try sort of a reverse smokey look. Also I wanted a challenge , since the lavender shade can be finicky , at least as a outer shade .

The colors I used At Last, L-O-V-E, It Takes Two , Moon River and Love Train. I always have to use Love Train! for my brow bone I think I used an Urban Decay shade along with another Juvia’s Place neutral. I’m not really sure but I wanted it to blend a bit better.

Moon River is such a nice shimmer too ! It’s got to be one of my favorites in the whole palette.

Bee Look:

I felt bad about neglecting the yellow, plus I had a gold lipstick to test out. So I wanted to try bee colors. I used the shades Love Me Do and Brown Eyed Girl and Buttercup. Brown Eyed Girl sadly suffers from blendablity issues as well but because I patted it on my eyes it didn’t look too bad.

Buttercup is a really nice shade and easy to place on my lids.

And final look !: Candy graphic look !

I was inspired by the promo pictures for the Urban Decay Smiley palette promo pictures.  I used my Nyx pencil to get the shape , and placed Be My Baby first, then outlined with River Deep , and finally blended HeartBreak Hotel with River Deep.  Love Me Do and Chapel of Love were used on the brow bones.

 

Overall I really like this palette despite it’s flaws. I had a lot of fun seeing what different things I could do with the colors, and I really wanted to experiment a bit with color placement.  I do think some of the shades could turn people off due to consistency and blendability. The darkest shades being harder to blend out , and pastel shades being hard to work with. But the other mattes worked well and and the shimmers were beautiful . This was my first Beauty Bay palette and I can see why people like them , as the color story was really fun.  Well let me know what you think and if you’ve tried any other Beauty Bay products.