colour play

There’s nothing like spring flowers and impending Easter egg dying to remind us that playing with colors isn’t just part of spring, it’s fun.

I’ve always seen makeup as an art medium and MAC Cosmetics totally agrees with me. If you haven’t noticed their painterly packaging, product names, and collection photos, check out their new Colour Play application when browsing their products online. Sometimes it’s fun to see what dark blue smoky eyeliner would look like with gold eyeshadow and a nude peach lip, but it’s also stress-reducing when planning for an event or trip. This weekend, for example, I know I’m packing Tinted Lip Conditioner in Gentle Coral when I go out of town. After browsing the Tinted Lip Conditioner page upder lip products, I clicked on the Colour Play button at the bottom of the product description. The application automatically pulls up the color range of the last product you were looking at, so if it wasn’t the exact shade of fuschia you were looking for, you can see how the other MAC options compare. You can also adjust the color with the rainbow bar on the left, or click “reset all filters at the bottom of the menu.“ I pulled up all 660 product swatches and narrowed them down by area they’re meant to be used on, product form, finish, and coverage. I picked out blush, eyeshadow, and eyeliner to go with it, which definitely saved me some packing anxiety.

There are probably a million uses for this application. Two that might be particularly useful:

Shop your beauty drawer - Shopping in our own closets is getting a lot of attention, but think about that impulse-buy gold glitter nail polish or red lipstic circa the office Christmas party in ‘07. Use the application to pull up swatches approximating your entire makeup arsenal and rediscover some fun items you probably forgot you had. Tag the swatches as your favorites and you won’t have to go hunting the next time you open the application on your computer.

Expose weaknessess - By the same token, you might discover you have seven light pink lip products, or only wear lipgloss. Spring is the perfect time to play with new colors and textures, and the application lets you browse both. Once you get a sense of a new frontier you might like to explore, stop by Belk and have the makeup artists take the helm. You might discover it doesn’t work for you, but it’s still fun and it washes off.

If you want to test your color skills, try this hue spotting test the whole office is obsessed with. It can be a little headache-inducing, but we can’t stop playing with it.