If you’ve ever taken an art class before, you’d be familiar with tonal exercises. Tonal exercises are what you use to study shade gradations. One such exercise is similar to what I have illustrated here—bars of a color, from white to dark/black, shown in varying degrees.
Here are some very utilized eyeshadows: my matte browns. Starting from a non-brown but a beige-y off-white, Laura Mercier’s Vanilla Nuts is actually a shade I use(d) fairly often as a base for my entire lid and as a browbone highlight. Le Métier de Beauté’s Tamarack and Laura Mercier’s Café Au Lait are two subtle crease colors, to aid with transition and slight depth. Addiction Truffle is a warm, creamy matte brown I use for the outer corner or crease. Laura Mercier’s Coffee Ground is darker, the shade of cocoa powder. I use that for the outer corner or a really dark crease, too. Last, but not the least, Laura Mercier’s Rich Coffee, which is great for the outer corner, too, but is also a very nice dark brown (almost black!) shade for a sophisticated smoky eye or subtle liner definition.
Now that I study it, it looks a bit like Urban Decay Naked Basics, except for the fact that my selection is all-matte. What are your favorite matte brown eyeshadows? Do share!
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I like the mattes in the original Naked palette, basics is subtly different. I like using some matte bronzers as eye shadows, Bourjois’ Bronzing Powder is a great shade.
Is it weird that the first thing I noticed is that almost all the colors are named after food? Vanilla, coffee, truffle… mmmm!
I don’t really have a favorite matte brown… I do like Buck from the first Naked palette, and the Too Faced Matte palette has a couple matte browns that I like as well. (Okay, I looked for them to find their names: Chinchilla and Coffee Bean. Moar coffee!!)
I use Vanilla Nuts often too! It’s the most dented in my LM palette 🙂
I just realized LM makes great matte browns in different nuances!