The best time to buy cosmetic palettes

For me, December is the best time to buy cosmetics. All of the brands come out with limited edition palettes, be it lip gloss, eye shadow, blush on, or combination. Thanks to recent focus groups I had to attend that brought me outside of home & office. Since my office is just 15-min drive from my home, I barely come to downtown, which is kinda sad, esp approaching the end of the year like this. So after the groups, I walked to Central Chidlom 3 times in 2 days, and spent most of the time in cosmetic counters.

And as I mentioned, there were so many palettes! Laura Mercier came out with Beauty Books, combining colors of the season for lips, eyes, and cheeks. Lip book and Eye book come with the brushes. I think they're great buys, esp the Eye book, 2 base colors, 3 pinkish-purple shades, 3 earth-tone shades, and 1 black for liner and smokey eyes. But I already have purple shades (Mac, many years ago) and Bobby Brown Shimmer Brick. So I passed (but still think about it hourly!).

Nars, which hasn't been in Thailand for long, came up with too many palettes! I think they have 7 combination palettes and 3 lip palettes. 7 combination palettes are just too many! I mean, I for one couldn't make any sense of it. I couldn't tell which one is better than which. Plus, there's no emerging theme, just simply mix & match of colors. The management probably couldn't make up their mind and simply launched everything. Seriously, just launch a couple of great palettes and launch with a theme and you'll be doing so much better! (Plus it's $70 at website, and 3400 baht a the counter, what a ripoff!)

I also visited Mac, Stila, Bobbi Brown and Shu Uemura. Mac got gorgeous bags with (so-so) brushes and colors. The bags are so bohemian-chic. But I don't like Mac products, and I HATE Mac sellers. They're so mean.

Bobbi Brown got 2 brush sets and 2 lip palettes, all at good bargain. I bought the lip gloss palette one, 7 colors at 1600 Baht, good deal isnt it? Shu got 2 eye palettes and something else I don't remember, but not so exciting.

So I noticed that purple is in. Purple is in every single palette. Gloss and shimmer are still here, but not as much as the past few years. And the best thing is that everything is 10% off or more. And I'm sure today's not the last day in December I bought cosmetics.