Dandy Lions Cosmetics has been a makeup brand that has been on my radar for quite a while. I have this long list on a notepad of all the indie brands I eventually want to try. Although I have been able to cross quite a few companies off my list over the past few years, I seem to add just as many. I feel like every time I blink a new indie brand opens up. Some don’t vibe with me, but more often than not there is something that catches my eye. Thankfully I’m not made of money, so I can’t purchase everything because after hearing some reviews I’m often glad I didn’t. It’s not always that the product is bad, but it’s just not something new or better than anything else already out there. Yet purchasing from indie brands is something overall I find to be wonderful. I love supporting small businesses and since they are smaller they tend to have some cooler more interesting products long before some of the big brand companies. For example multi chromes; indie brands were all over them way before the big store brands were claiming they practically invented this new amazing color shift, (Yes I’m looking at you Natasha Denona) and honestly indie brands still do them much better.
Dandy Lions Cosmetics has quite a variety of products ranging from eyeshadows to highlighters to a few accessories. They have a decent selection of different eyeshadow finishes including mattes, shimmers/satins/metallic, duochromes, multichromes and sparkle. Although all of their shadows look really nice, it was their new matte collection that really made me decide this was the brand I wanted to try next. My list has no order, so it’s usually something I see on Instagram or another form of social media that will make me pick a particular brand off my list out to try. Their new matte collections come in two bundles (you can also purchase the shadows individually) a group of browns and a group of blues and
greens. It’s not that they aren’t colors I haven’t seen before, but it was richness, vibrancy and creaminess of the shadows in the pictures that made me do a double take. Matte shadows in rich colors can be hard, they can be patchy, not easy to blend out or completely blend away. I especially find this issue with colors like blue and purple. So I was very intrigued, when I saw the initial color swatches. Plus with cute names like Foglet, Winkle, Apple Butter and Shitake to name a few of course these were right up my ally. I know swatches can be misleading, but for some reason I got a gut feeling that these shadows would perform. Since I had heard decent things about this brand, I bit the bullet and bought both bundles on release day.
After receiving the shadows and playing around with them, I have to say I am glad I bit the bullet and got them! These mattes are so creamy and have amazing color payoff. I found them easy to blend, like I said there is a lot of of color pay off so it's probably best to go in on the lighter side first. I tend to be heavy handed, so I was happy to find the blended out nicely. The shadows also do not brush out to nothing either when blending them together. That's one thing that drives me nuts is when you have a gorgeous color on and then when you go to smooth everything out it just disappears. One thing to note and this is mentioned on their website these particular mattes are made to have a decent amount of kick up in the pan. So if that bothers you, you may have an issue as there I did find there was a lot of kick up with all the colors.
*Looks using the matte shades along with some shimmers, multichromes and glitters from other brands.
Overall and I very satisfied with my purchase. These might be the creamiest matte shadows I have ever worked with. I especially pleased with the performance of the green and blue shades, as I find a lot of them to be disappointing. With other brands they either blend way to nothing or are super patchy, however with these they worked lovely. The brown shades also performed equally as well. I loved that they were on the cooler side, but you could definitely create a warmer look as well. Dandy Lion Cosmetics is definitely a brand I am going to keep on my list of shops I want to purchase more from in the future. If you are interested is seeing how some of the shadows performed, I have a short video tutorial below.
Close ups from the tutorial.
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