Shu Uemura GWP Travel Palette / Art of Travel Palette
Recently, Shu Uemura online offered a travel palette as a gift with purchase. The required purchase was pretty steep – $100 – but since I needed to repurchase my favorite cleansing oil, which is $67 and lasts me about a year, I decided to add some false lashes to my order and go for it!
This palette is an incredible value; the palette itself is reusable as a freeform eyeshadow palette, and it contains four eyeshadows (each half the size of Shu’s regular eyeshadows), two cream eyeshadows/eyeliners, and a full-sized glow-on blush.
Additionally, it appears from googling that this exact same palette has been sold as the Art of Travel palette for around $50 in airport duty free shops (reviews here & here).
I believe that this palette does not have Shu Uemura’s current eyeshadow formula (known as the 3rd generation of Shu eyeshadow); instead, it has the previous eyeshadow formula (the 2nd generation formula). Unfortunately, the shadows are nameless, but I have checked with some lovely people who own some Shu eyeshadows, and to the best of my knowledge, from left to right, the eyeshadow shades are:
- ME800 (beige with slight pink sheen; satin/shimmer)
- Unknown (pink; satin/shimmer)
- ME850 (taupe; satin/shimmer)
- P990 (black; matte with sparkle)
Shu Uemura ME 800, Unknown, ME850, P990
The eyeshadows all have a really lovely texture – very soft, smooth and creamy.
The eyeliners are also quite nice. I was surprised to realize that the black eyeliner/cream shadow has a subtle purpley-pink sparkle – it doesn’t show at all when used as a liner, but is slightly visible when used as a cream shadow. The other cream shadow looks white in the pan, but is a soft, shimmering gold when applied. Unfortunately, I did experience some creasing after about 5-6 hours when I used it as a base.
The blush is soft and silky, but not a great shade for my skintone; it was very difficult to get the swatch to show up in a photograph! It did show up on my face, but was quite subtle. It would be a good everyday / easy shade for a fairskinned, cool-toned person, but I don’t see it working on anyone even a touch darker than I am.
In the following photo, I’m wearing the blush – it was more visible in person, but if you look carefully you can see it in the photo. I’m also wearing the taupe eyeshadow.
And here’s a closeup of my eye; I have the beige eyeshadow in the inner corner, the taupe eyeshadow on the lid, and I’ve lined with the black liner, then gone over the line with the black eyeshadow. I then used Burberry Trench to blend out the edges; the one fault of the palette is that it doesn’t have a matte highlight / blending shade, which I consider essential.
Overall, I think it’s a really lovely palette. I’ve seen it offered as a GWP on two occasions on the Shu website, and if they offer it again, I think it’s worth a purchase to get it! It’s not a standalone travel product for me – I need a separate blush and a separate blending/highlight shade, not to mention the rest of my makeup – but the eyeshadows alone make the palette worthwhile. I may, however, decide to take it apart; I’d use the palette as a freestyle eyeshadow palette, keep the eyeshadows, and give away, swap, or sell the blush to someone with a lighter complexion.
Shu Uemura Travel Palette Review & Swatches is a post from Project Swatch.
