Eyes

Darling, you’re so fancy! You’re so fancy with your tweed shift dress and your strand o’ pearls and your Kate Spade purse and your boots with the fur…

Wait — the boots there took it in the wrong direction.

I guess what I’m trying to say is this: sometimes drugstore just won’t do.

Although I love it. Don’t get me wrong, drugstore has its time and place, but sometimes it just won’t do, you know? Like when you’re heading to the Hamptons or Napa or a fancy to-do, and you want/need something a little more special or dressy than your usual fare.

Sometimes, you just want to treat yo’ self, and for those occasions, Chanel has new eyeshadow quads. 🙂

Yup, there’s some exciting stuff happening at Chanel this fall. They’re relaunching their famous Les 4 Ombres Quadra eyeshadows in a completely new baked formula.

Unlike the classic quads with the square pans, the pans in these new quads ($61 each and available now), which were inspired by Chanel’s vibrant tweed trappings, have a round shape and a baked formula.

The tweed theme is one Chanel has done before. You might remember the (now discontinued) tweed blushes from back in the day.

So, the theme isn’t a new one for Chanel, but they’ve taken it in a slightly different direction.

The threads here are metaphorical, as in the relationship among the colors in each quad. Each quad includes the colors to do an entire eye look from start to finish. You have two medium tones for color and contrast, a deeper shade for contouring and a light shade to highlight and illuminate.

The new baked formula also lasts a very long time (7-8 hours on my combination dry/oily lids), so if you have an all-day affair, you can apply one of these in the morning on top of a primer — I like NARS Pro Prime, which is the one I’ve been using with these — and the shadows won’t crease or smudge.

And you can do a bunch of different looks with each of these quads. You could dress it down using one of the lighter medium shades all over your lids, and then maybe add the darkest shade on your lash lines to keep it really simple. Or, you could go fancy-pants on that @ss with something more complicated.

Each of the quads actually comes with a little booklet to walk you through a few different looks.

Here’s the thing, though — I’ve been using five of the nine new quads, mostly the neutrals and one of the brights (the breathtaking bright green one on the Chanel website right now), and I’ve noticed that finish-wise, you don’t get a lot of matte options. There’s a lot of shimmer here, but I like to have a little bit of matte up in the mix, just because my creases aren’t super deep, so I like to define them with something deep and matte for depth.

You could achieve that depth with the darker shades here, which is the intention, but a lot of the darker shades glisten with shimmer. I just find that I get more depth from a matte in the crease than I do with a shimmer.

These new quads create a very distinct glow — very pretty — but it’s just that, you know, I feel like I need a little more matte up in the mix.

Not a big deal, but you know. Whatever. 🙂

• Tissé Vendôme: Copper, peachy beige, intense apricot and grayish brown
• Tissé Gabrielle: Soft gray, iridescent white gold, grayish mauve and velvet gray
• Tissé Camélia: Grayish lilac, rosy white, lavender pink and eggplant brown
• Tissé Cambon: Iridescent mauve, pale pink, bright pink and deep violet
• Tissé Mademoiselle: Intense beige, satin gold, luminous beige and khaki brown
• Tissé Vénitien: Bluish green, silvery pink, platinum khaki and intense green
• Tissé Rivoli: Golden taupe, light rosy beige, rose gold beige and reddish brown
• Tissé Riviera: Metallic blue, light pink, shimmery gray and deep navy blue
• Tissé Poésie: (Limited Edition) Golden beige, light pinkish beige, bronze taupe and a dark purplish bronze

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