SoHo de Chanel Highlighting Powders and Blush - Swatched

It arrived - quickly! After the angst associated with my SoHo Story order, the one limited-edition piece I was able to secure, SoHo de Chanel Highlighting Powders and Blush ($65) arrived yesterday. I rushed out to grab some sunshine and get swatch photos.

This blush-and-powder palette, comprised of light plum, pink-ivory (really ivory), and soft pink shades for face and décolleté, puts the name of the Chanel Boutique - in hip, downtown SoHo, New York - front and center.

The powder highlighter/blush is light - really light. So, my swatches won't show you much. The photos taken in shade were as bad as it gets. The sunshine photos show a lot of shimmer - more than the powder has - but they also show how sheer and light these shades are.

I would call this compact a highlighter. You could consider it a blusher if you use the darker shade on the left side of the compact - and only that shade. When mixed, as I show below, you get a very light tone - a little color, but barely darker than my pale skin.

I'm sure you can see that the darkest shade (photo at right) has some color. Use it alone, which is easy, given the size of the dark shade in the compact, and you get a pretty plum-toned brown blush. The two lighter shades below are highlighters on my skin, so they will be the same on darker skin. The darker your skin, the lighter these colors will appear.

At left is the swatch that resulted from taking a fluffy blush brush and circling it around the palette to mix the shades. It's visible on my cheeks and my arm, but extremely hard to detect in this photo. You see more shimmer here than it actually has because the photo was taken in full sun. That was the only way I could show you the shade. It's brown with a plummy cast - pretty.

Was this compact worth the angst? Probably not. I like it and will use it. Is it groundbreaking? Nope! Perhaps that's one reason it's still available at Chanel's Web site, while the eye shadow quad is listed as backordered, and other limited items are too.

Photo at top courtesy of Chanel