This palette is taking me right back to my blogging roots in the days of windscreen wiper brush strokes and arm swatches. The trend for palettes has dipped in favour of eye crayons, single shadows and creme formulas but PLouise Feeling Peachy has made me wonder if we are due for a resurgence any minute now.
As you can see by absolutely everything, from name to execution, that this palette is all about peachy shades, but there is an interesting back story to PLouise, aka P.Louise, aka Paige Williams who started a make up academy in 2014 aged just 21. These days the brand is first and foremost make up and it’s the success story for UK beauty talent that you’ve probably never heard of if you’re not glued to TikTok. With no presence in retail, PLouise exists almost entirely on TikTok shop ,where – get ready for this – in a TikTok record breaking move, she sold £1.5 million worth of product in 12 hours in a TikTok live averaging 2 products sold every second. Paige’s brand made over £60 million last year. What an absolutely brilliant injection into the UK economy. And yet. PLouise is not without controversy – several things crop up (the first thing I do with a new-to-me brand is google ‘controversies’), not least a racial slur followed by a make up collection called the Cancelled Collection. I get Make Up Revolution vibes from this brand, but people change and grow so who knows where she is on this now. I enjoyed playing with the palette but whether I’d go back to it, I don’t know.
Kicking off with the full arsenal of colours in this arm swatch where I nearly ran out of arm. To my surprise, none of the shades are named but the ones I want to point out to you are the shimmery shades because they’re beautiful, creamy textures (4 & 5, 8 & 9) that glide over the lid without feeling greasy or oily and the gleam that beams off them is unreal. The first and last swatches are blush which you need very little of because they’re pigment packed.
I know I look silly but I’m trying to show you as much lid as I can and it’s always very annoying to discover I haven’t blended something properly!
I used shade 9 in the swatch for my lids and under bottom lashes with a base of 3 and put 7 in the crease. I couldn’t cram on any more. I love what these affordable colours do for my eyes but I’m conflicted over this brand – I can see that the products are made in China – these days there are some beautiful textures and formulas coming from China and it would not surprise me at all if they were coming from the same factories as Revolution but they’re not known for their generous working conditions and terms. I’m 100% on board with affordable make up because some of the prices we see are so horribly inflated and I know this brand has 3 million followers on TikTok who live and breathe the brand but I can’t quite ‘feel’ it for some reason. The brand founder doesn’t feel present in the products although she is known for hosting her own TikTok channel giving product demonstrations and tutorials. Maybe fast growth has perhaps contributed to a personality loss and there are so many bundle sales that make everything so much cheaper that it starts to feel too cheap – you actually get a free magazine, lip base and lip liner with every purchase and there are five products for £10 in the Discontinued Mystery Products bundle section. A random look at reviews across all categories showed five stars on every single one, bar one, and I went through all the categories. If I just look at the palette it gets all the ticks but if I look too far away from it, I have questions.
