Tarte Holiday '08

Tarte's holiday collection is up on Sephora.com and just seeing the photos literally made me gasp! Once again, the ladies at Tarte have simply outdone themselves in offering holiday sets that are even bigger and better than previous years.

1. The Vanity Limited-Edition Palette: This has a whopping $494 retail value for the great price of *only* $52. It includes 16 brand-new eyeshadows, 16 brand-new lipglosses, a deluxe Lights, Camera, Lashes! mascara, a deluxe Mineral Powder Bronzer in Park Avenue Princess, a deluxe luminizer, four powder blushes, and deluxe eyeshadow and eyelining brushes. All products are loaded with skinvigorating™ ingredients: vitamin E, beeswax, rice bran wax, carnauba wax, and mineral pigments.

2. Purse Your Lips Limited Edition Lipgloss Clutch: This set of 9 lipglosses ($39 with a retail value of $106) are brand-new, limited-edition shades that are infused with the Tarte t5 super fruit complex™, which is a proprietary blend of the five most active superfruits: goji, acai, maracuja, acerola, and pomegranate.

3. Très Cheek Limited Edition Mini Cheek Stain Set: This has a $50 retail value for the price of $25. I believe that's $5 cheaper compared to previous years when the sets used to go for $30. The shades are Posh (soft plum), Fierce (light strawberry red) and Chic (golden coral peach), all infused with skinvigorating™ ingredients: acai fruit extract, goji berry extract, pomegranate extract, acerola extract, maracuja extract.





I'm glad to see that Tarte has kept the price of the mega palette at $52, unlike some companies (cough *MAC!* cough) which raise their prices every year. The eyeshadow shades are also much more interesting than last year's palette of neutrals and pale pastels with the occasional gunmetal grey and smokey teal. At least this year's palette has a few bright shades that will be fun to experiment with.

The big drawback is that Tarte has kept the swivel-out pan design which is just not consumer-friendly at all. The cheek stains, which were excellent in last year's palette, are also gone and replaced by powder blushes. I do like the addition of the luminiser, mascara and bronzer, which have replaced the really craptastic cream eyeliners and primer which all remained untouched in my palette.

The 16 lip shades look great, but quite similar to last year's selection. I think I've only used about half of the lip shades in my palette from last year. About one-third of them were pretty good with great color payoff and a moisturising texture, but some of them just disappeared completely on my lips.

I also like the look of this year's mini cheek stain trios and lipgloss set. The lipgloss set has a very good variety of shades that should be great fun to play around with. This appeals to me much more than, say, Stila's holiday lipglaze sets which usually include 6 shades, of which 4 will look exactly like one another once applied as the color payoff is minimal. The cute gold packaging of the cheek stains is another nice touch, and will go nicely with my growing collection of mini cheek stains.

I need to arrange for a CP ASAP! :-)