Laura Mercier Portable Colour Palette For Eyes, Cheeks & Lips Holiday 2014

Nothing beats a well designed eye and cheek kit for stress-free travel!  Not only do you save space in your luggage, it saves time in the morning when everything is contained in one little package.

The LM kit is very compact with no wasted space, but has everything you need for a full face:  three eyeshadows, cake eyeliner, lip gloss, and two colors of powder blush.  

The Second Skin Cheek Colour blushes are lovely and the colors Lush Nectarine and Barely Pink are part of the permanent line.  I love that you can choose from a bright pop of coral or a natural light pink flush.

The deluxe size Lip Glace is in the shade Rosebud, which is a surprisingly pigmented light rose color.

Lastly the kit contains eyeshadows in Vanilla Nuts, Baroque, and Cedar, and a cake liner in Ground Espresso.  Vanilla Nuts is a smooth cream colored matte.  Baroque is a pinky light browny matte with tiny sparkles, but looks matte on skin.  Cedar is a mid-toned bronzey brown with a creamy satin finish.  The two matte shades are slightly powdery but you can just tap your brush to get rid of the excess before applying.  They're pretty smooth, maybe in the middle range of pigmentation.  The darker Cedar shade is sort of a warm, antique bronze with a lightly shimmery satin finish.  It goes on pretty creamy with very nice texture and high pigmentation, although it seemed to disappear when I blended it out.

The cake liner is really good, as far as cake liners go.  I found it very easy to work with and intensely pigmented.  It went on opaquely with a single stroke.

The big disappointment for me was the choice in eye color.  A good travel kit should contain a full eye look and not require you to carry around a bunch of supplements.  Unfortunately the best I can get out of this is a very natural, almost nonexistent look, which can be amped up with winged liner.  The eyeshadow selection is so blah, I might as well have saved my money and just bought a cake liner single and would have gotten the same results.

I'm mystified why in this kit only the definer shade has any shimmer while the two lighter ones are matte  The cream color matte Vanilla Nuts would most likely be used as a matte highlighter, or maybe a base shade to brighten the lid without adding color.  The mid-tone matte Baroque looks most appropriate to me as a transition shade.  It's too boring to be used alone on the lid and on my skintone just gives me that so-attractive "Swollen Eye" look.  And Cedar, the only shade I actually liked, is too warm and not really dark enough to be a good definer color.  I feel like the color/finish choices were very uninspired as I know Laura Mercier has much better options in her permanent line.  

Overall I love the concept of this kit, and I give high points for the compact and efficient design of the case, and the blushes and lipgloss are lovely, but the completely boring and mostly useless eyeshadow choices just ruin it for me.  I know Laura Mercier has some beautiful eyeshadows out there, I mean her Artist Palette for Eyes is one of my all time favorites, which makes the selection in this kit mystifying and just plain frustrating.