Face of Australia Budge Proof Eyeshadow

I was in Priceline checking out a Covergirl sale the other day when I happened across these Face of Australia Budge Proof Eyeshadows. Now, I'm not regularly in Priceline, nor am a huge fan of Face of Australia generally (except for their primer, which is the bomb), so I have no idea how long these have been around. I haven't heard any of the seagulls pimping them though, so I'm going to assume they are pretty new. You can't tell from their website, because it doesn't seem to be all that up to date.

These are obviously FOA's crack at the Maybelline Color Tattoo popularity. I think there were 8 shades - the two I have, as well as a bronze, a teal, a darker blue, a dark purple, a gold and a light pink. I wanted to buy some just to check them out, but to be honest I struggled to find colours I really liked that much. The pink was nice enough, but too similar to Inked in Pink, a Color Tattoo I already have. Same with the bronze and the gold - too similar to Bad to the Bronze and Bold Gold. I wouldn't wear navy or teal eyeshadows so they were out. That left the green, the purple and the taupe. I wanted the purple at first, which was a lovely shade in the jar, but the swatch was pretty muddy - it looked kind of dirty brown rather than what the jar promised. I wasn't super impressed with the swatches of the green or the taupe either, but I had to buy SOMETHING, so I went with those. At $8.95 each, it was a risk I was okay with.

The colours I got were Poison Ivy and Tip Top Taupe. In the jar, Poison Ivy is a dark hunter green, but again it went muddy when applied. Tip Top Taupe was... eh. It's a taupe. Unlike Maybelline's Tough as Taupe, this one has some shimmer and sparkle in it. The consistency of these is very smooth - almost weirdly so. They apply sheerly, but they are buildable, and layering seems to make the colour come out better. The colour never does appear as you'd think from the jar though, which is disappointing. That muddiness never quite goes away.

These swatches are layered a couple of times, and you can see that even then they're not super opaque, or super clear colours.

Are they budge proof? Not really. They creased and faded a bit on me by the end of the day, and I wonder if that is also because of how many layers I had to apply to get the colours to show properly. I imagine these would be okay for people with dry eyelids - perhaps those who find the Color Tattoos too drying - but I have oilyish eyelids, and these didn't last the distance of the Color Tattoos or Benefit Creaseless Creams.

These are the hand swatches after about 6 hours, with several washing of hands and a lot of general cleaning and wiping going on, so I guess in that sense they are budge proof because although they fade, they do stain. I cleaned them off eventually with my L'Oreal Micellar Water and that removed them well enough, though I did find that when I used the green on my eyes I was still convinced I could see a greenish tinge on my crease even after I'd used makeup remover.

In summary, I found these to be pretty meh. I'd like them if the colours were clearer, brighter and more true, but for now I'd say if you have similar shades in Color Tattoos already, don't bother busting out to get these.