Face palette

A face palette is a compact of complexion colours meant to be used together: a bronzer to warm the face, a blush for the cheeks, a highlighter for the tops of the cheekbones, and sometimes a cooler shade for contour. The pans may hold pressed powder, cream or a mix of the two, from a two-pan duo to a case of eight. What makes it a palette rather than three separate products is that the shades were chosen as a set, to suit one range of skin tones and to blend into one another.

Its neighbours differ in what the pans hold. A contour palette pairs shadow with light to sculpt; a blush palette offers several blushes; an eye-and-face palette adds eyeshadows. A face palette’s strength is convenience and harmony. Its weakness is that you buy the set: if one shade is wrong for you, it stays in the case.

Start with depth. Many face palettes come in versions for light, medium and deep skin, and the bronzer is the shade to judge by: it should be one or two shades deeper than your skin, no more, and warm rather than grey. A bronzer that is too pale vanishes; one that is too deep looks muddy. Then check the blush. Soft pinks and peaches suit fair skin, while deeper skin often needs richer berries, brick and terracotta to show at all.

Next, the finish. Mattes blur texture and suit every day; shimmer and glitter catch the light and show every pore. Most palettes mix the two, with the highlighter as the shiniest pan. Cream palettes melt into the skin and suit dry or mature skin, while powder lasts longer on oily skin and over foundation that has been set. And count the pans you would really use: a blush-and-bronzer duo may earn more space in a makeup bag than an eight-pan case, half of which never leaves it.

Work from the deepest shade to the lightest. Bronzer goes first, where the sun would land: the temples, the tops of the cheekbones and along the jaw, in a loose figure three. Blush follows on the apples of the cheeks, blended up towards the bronzer so that the two meet without a line. Highlighter comes last and least, on the highest point of the cheekbone, the brow bone or the bridge of the nose.

Use a separate brush for each shade if you can: a large, fluffy one for bronzer, a rounded one for blush and a small tapered one for highlight. One brush for everything carries bronzer into the blush pan and muddies both. With a cream palette, apply before any powder, with fingertips or a damp sponge, and tap rather than rub so the foundation beneath stays put.

A palette goes further than its labels suggest. A matte bronzer swept through the crease of the eye gives a soft, warm eyeshadow; a touch of blush on the lids or across the bridge of the nose ties the face together; a highlighter dabbed on the inner corners of the eyes or the centre of the lower lip catches the light there too. Makers’ names for each pan are suggestions, not rules.

Powder pans develop a hard, shiny skin where oil from fingers or brushes has built up, and the colour stops picking up. Rub the surface lightly with a clean tissue or tap it with a clean brush to break the film. Wash brushes often, since a bronzer brush used on blush leaves a brown cast behind. Cream pans want clean fingertips and a closed lid; a cream that has dried out or begun to smell odd has had its time.

The case that holds more than one colour for the face is older than the face palette. In the 1920s, as makeup became acceptable enough to be put on in public, jewellers made vanity cases for it. One in the Victoria and Albert Museum, made in Paris about 1926 for Lacloche Frères, holds powder and rouge in two compartments, with a detachable lipstick holder between them and a mirror in the lid.^[1] Cheaper cases did the same job: Tre-Jur’s triple vanity of 1924 held compact face powder, a smaller rouge compact and a lipstick, and rouge compressed into a compact became its most popular form.^[2]

Light came into the case later. Revlon’s Face Gleamer of 1967 was a stick blusher used to highlight, more concerned with accentuating the cheekbones than with mimicking natural colour.^[2] Half a century later light became the fashion. In 2015, NPD figures showed American prestige face makeup growing on “Instagram-driven trends like highlighting, contouring, strobing and sculpting”, with strobing products alone adding more than 30 million dollars to the market.^[3] The large palettes of those years rode a boom that the trade press was by 2019 describing as a period of “hyperspend” in makeup, “driven by beauty crazes like contouring and palettes”.^[4] By 2020 Glossy reported that “trend-driven makeup products like highly pigmented eyeshadow palettes and highlighters are no longer the driver of cosmetic sales”.^[5]

The face palette outlasted the craze by going back to what the vanity case did: putting the few colours a face needs into one case, with a mirror.