megapost

I’ve had this post brewing for months and finally dusted it off in light of the recent controversy with Z Palette. If you don’t know about it, read about it here, here, and here. Um yeah… total gong show. 😮 Z Palette is probably the most well-known of any major custom palette systems, so their social media misstep has certainly opened the door for other players to secure a larger share of the market. People are now looking for Z Palette alternatives – let’s have a look at what the options are:

I’ll be showing what I own and also list some that I know about but do not own. All prices are shown in Canadian dollars unless otherwise noted. Warning: long post and lots of photos! 😎

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Today’s post is dedicated to Julija of Infinitely Awkward, and pays homage to fivezero’s megaposts. In one of the comments, Julija asked me how many Illamasqua polishes I owned – I did a quick count from my inventory spreadsheet, and the answer was: 47. 😮 (Correction, the number of unique shades is actually 44, I purchased back-ups of certain shades which I will indicate with an asterisks) Arguably, Illamasqua are one of my all time favourites in terms of formula and colour selection. Up until last year, I had easy access to the brand but unfortunately, Illamasqua decided to exit from the North American market. Many of the ones I own were purchased during the clearance sales. Here is my Illamasqua collection, grouped by colour:

I also recently purchased these nail swatching spoons – I’ve been looking for ones with short handles (on the right) rather than the long ones that are meant for display purposes (left):

I’m pleased with these shorter ones, now I can see swatches of all my polishes easily and store them on a ring. I’ll probably do series of nail polish megaposts with other brands in my stash. Here we go – every single shade of Illamasqua nail polish I own swatched. These are listed alphabetically and shown with 2 coats (no base / top coat) – shade descriptions are from Illamasqua’s site where possible.