LORAC Wild for TANtalizer Collection Summer 2012 Swatches and Review

Tiny little kit from LORAC for summer 2012. Not quite as cool as last year's kit, but still pretty good. It has four shades of shadow, a bronzer/highlighter and a gloss just like the last one, but the colors in this set are more toned-down, soft and earthy.

LORAC Wild for TANtalier Bronzing Powder
A rosy, warm, tan-colored bronzing powder striped with champagne metallic shimmer overspray.

LORAC Wild for TANtalizer Eyeshadow Palette
Fierce (peachy-gold shimmer), Tigris (warm deep copper shimmer), Panthera (warm golden-bronze shimmer) and Saber (dark plum-bronze shimmer).

Shadow and bronzer palette ingredients. Click to enlarge.

LORAC TANtalizer Lips with Benefits Gloss in Raoul
Four different shades swirled in one tube. When mixed together, they create a frosty peach-nude.

LORAC's Lips with Benefits glosses are really cool. They're swirled and tiger-striped with several different colors and finishes of gloss, but when you remove the wand from the tube, it mixes them together into one color. It's really neat. The one downside to this is that the cool swirly design isn't permanent. Within a few uses (pictured above at three), the stripes begin to deform and eventually all blend together.

What I liked:

• Shadow formula is soft, pigmented, smooth and easy to blend. The colors all go really well with each other. I really like them.
• The bronzer design is cool looking.
• Bronzer color isn't too dark for my fair skin.
  
• The Lips with Benefits gloss smells amazing. It has a realistic caramelized sugar scent that makes me think of the sugar on top of crème brûlée.
• The Lips with Benefits formula is smooth and non-sticky. It's very thin but it's not slippery or slimy feeling.
• Love the swirled design and metallic copper cap on the Lips with Benefits gloss.
  
• The palettes each have their own mirror. That comes in handy if you like to carry your makeup with you for touchups.

What I didn't like:

• The shadow seems to lose some of its shimmer after a few hours of wear. It looks almost metallic when first applied but loses intensity throughout the day. It doesn't fall down onto my cheeks, it just... disappears.
  
• The bronzer is quite shimmery. The shimmer can be blended away during application, or removed from the product altogether (wipe it off with a tissue, it's overspray).
  
• The Lips with Benefits gloss in Raoul is extremely frosty when applied normally. When I wear it, I apply it like normal, but then blot away a bit of it and that removes some of the frostiness and makes it more wearable.
• The bag is a little on the ugly side. Plain, boring canvas with a horn-shaped wooden toggle. Not glamorous and flashy like the gold bag from last year. I get what they were going for with the styling, but who wants a plain canvas makeup bag?
  
• The palettes are cardboard. They aren't flimsy, but they don't feel like they'll hold up forever.

I like the eyeshadows the best out of anything in here. The texture and payoff are both satisfactory and all the colors blend together beautifully. I've been wearing it a lot this summer because it's so fast and easy to do a two-color look that looks like it took more effort than it really did. I've been wearing Panthera on the lid, Saber in the crease, sometimes with a little Fierce on the inner corners. Two minutes, done. Another thing I really like about the shadow palette is that it goes extremely well with blue mascara and eyeliner. No joke. If you have super dark brown eyes like mine, you need to try copper and bronze shadow with blue-black (or just plain blue) eyeliner and blue mascara. You'll be amazed.

This limited edition set retails for $39 and is available at Sephora.

(This was sent for review.)