I first saw this palette a while back and have had it sitting in my makeup drawer for a seriously long time (since late March) because I'm planning to save it and take it to Florida in July. I thought that this would be the perfect palette to take to the Hard Rock Hotel, and since I am a huge Rock music fan I decided to take the plunge and buy it! I bought this palette on Amazon UK for around £30. This is my first ever palette from theBalm and I'm really, really impressed with it! It's definitely on-par with Urban Decay's Dangerous palette for me, which is my favourite Urban Decay palette so far (yes, for me Dangerous beats Naked 2). This palette is full of little witty twists on music, and just being called the 'Balm Jovi' palette kinda gives you that impression. (Prepare for the ridiculous amount of pictures...this is probably the longest post I've EVER WRITTEN!) I even shot these pictures on top of one of my most prized possessions, my 1987 vinyl edition of Def Leppard's 'Animal'!
The palette is designed for the entire face, so it contains a huge heart-shaped mirror. Another thing within the design of this packaging (as you know I'm a sucker for packaging) is that there are a lot of 'tattoo' style designs, a lot of the text and backgrounds have that element of an LA tattoo store to them. This mirror is the perfect size to do your whole face in if you want to, and the lid which the mirror is on flips all the way backwards, so you can hold it more firmly.
Being designed as an on-the-go face palette, Balm Jovi also contains a highlighter, blusher and two lip and cheek stains.
The DISCO music themed highlighter is called Solid Gold, and is theBalm's famous Mary-Lou Manizer. I like how they have musically themed all the different aspects of this palette, you'll see what I mean as we go on. This highlighter looks sparkly but is just a little shimmery, and when applied with a light had looks great on the skin. It's the perfect summertime colour as it's a rich gold with lighter gold flecks and also translates great onto the eyelid alongside some of the eyeshadows in this palette.The blush in this palette is themed after POP music and is theBalm's popular FratBoy Blush. It's a pretty coral-pink, and leans more towards the pink side of coral than orange, it's sunny and warm. Again, this would be a perfect warm cheek for summer, I can imagine sitting under an umbrella by the pool with this lightly dusted over my cheeks.
Milly and Vanilly are the two lip/cheek stains included in the palette. I like that theBalm has chosen to include stains rather than lip glosses because it makes them less sticky and much more pleasurable to apply. Initially they are balmy in texture but become more matte after about 10 minutes on the lip and look ah-mazing! These stains are the R&B themed part of the palette. Milly is a muted beige-pink shade, this is perfect for a summer's day as it adds just that little bit of oomph to a casual look, it's sheerer than Vanilly. Vanilly is a bright pink-red, it definitely leans to the pinker side of red than it does blue-red or orange-red which I'm quite happy about because I already have my perfect blue-red (Ruby Woo) and I hate orange-red on my skin. I can see this being a beautiful stain on cheeks if applied with a light hand. Now, let's get to the real reason we're all here...eyeshadow.
I know, I know I'm constantly saying that I love eyeshadow but don't wear it as often as other products but this, this is just a spectacular eyeshadow palette! My favourite part of the eyeshadow palette is obviously the left hand side, being themed after HEAVY METAL bands (some of my favourites are in there).
Metal-ica is a beautiful frosted white, it's what I'd call a warm white but without any cream in it. The pigmentation of this shadow is ridiculous, it's soft and beautiful in application and so pigmented I even raised my eyebrows for a second! This is easily comparable to Urban Decay's best formulas. It has a silver shimmer/shift to it. Iron Maid-in is a cream with gold shimmer, again it is incredibly soft and really pigmented. It's a creamier, softer version of Solid Gold. Lead Zeppelin is a khaki green with gold flecks of glitter in it, the gold adds a warm summery tone to the green. For some reason thought this shadow seemed less soft and pigmented when compared to the other three shadows in this column. Alice Copper is my favourite throughout the entire palette, unlike it's name it is not fully copper but contains flecks of copper shimmer. It's the most matte out of all four shades in this collection but as aforementioned contains a little copper shimmer, the base colour is a dark burgundy/purple.
The central collection is all themed around CLASSICAL music and all four shadows are hard, creamy mattes. The texture when being pulled from the pan feels hard, but the eyeshadows are intact extremely creamy during application. Adagio is a brightening matte cream, it's less golden in colour than Iron Maid-in and reminds me of Blanc Type by MAC. It's soft and is a pretty brow highlight. Allegro is a deep mustard/brown colour, this central collection reminds me of last year's Glamour Doll Eyes Halloween 2 collection which I absolutely loved as well. I'm a huge sucker for mustard colours as they seem to look pretty good on my eyes, applied on the lid this is gorgeous, especially with a Presto in the crease and Moderato at the outer corner of the eye. Allegro is a little harder in palette than Adagio but is creamy upon pick-up and application. Moderato is Alice Copper's matte purpler cousin, it has the exact same formulation as Allegro and Presto, and similar pigmentation. Same goes for Presto, it's a hard shadow with creamy application. I like how this brown is much more than just plain brown, it has deep reddish undertones which add much more depth to it than expected.
Finally! The last collection is ALTERNATIVE music themed. Initially this was the collection of shadows I was most sceptical about, but after swatching them and looking them over a little more I really like them! Blink 1982 is a deep mauve/taupe/pink leaning towards more pink. It's got a little gold shimmer making it a pretty rosy gold colour, I think that this looks nice on the lid by it's self. It's very soft much like those in the left column.The Stroke was the only colour I looked at shiftily in the beginning as blue shadows can look really crap on me, but after swatching I realised it's a charcoal black/burnt blue with blue shimmer and not a bright navy blue as I initially imagined! I'm really looking forward to playing around with this, I might even show y'all my creations. This shadow has the same hard formulation as the central column, the texture really reminds me of Blackout from Urban Decay, pigmentation reminds me of Illamasqua's Lestat. rem (yes that's rem, no capitals) is a lavender purple, with a pink/gold shift to it, the shimmer in this is similar to the amount in Alice Copper. When combined with Third Eye Blinded I think that this would be a perfect summer daytime or springtime look. It's got a similar texture to that of Lead Zeppelin. Third Eye Blinded is a light oyster pink it's not glittery or shimmery but has a distinct sheen to it, it's really pretty but as you can see from the swatches above it's rather sheer. The texture would be described as a baby of rem and Blink 1982, this is a pretty inner-corner colour.
All in all I LOVE this palette more than any other palette I've used before (except maybe my custom MAC palette), I love the surprising amount of pigmentation in these shadows, and I'm really, really impressed at the amount of stuff you get for your money. All of the colours are extremely gorgeous, including those of the highlighter, blush, and stains and they all go together. This'd be a great palette to do a day to night look with.
This'd be a good palette for near-beginners as it has a variety of textures and colours, as well as this little guide at the base of the palette that folds out from over the stains.
This is what I mean by 'folds out', it means that none of the powdery stuff from Solid Gold and Don't you want me? can go in the stains like they can in most full face palettes. It also means that the stains can't smudge out into the powders. Which is a really cool design idea because powder smudging into palette gloss/stain is what pisses me off about face palettes usually.
I'd definitely recommend this palette, it's durable, travel-worthy and contains everything you could possibly need! I'm really impressed with my first ever purchase from theBalm and I'm definitely going to look more into it when I go to America in July because it'll be cheaper out there, hey, I might even bring something back for you guys! This is the perfect palette for those of us who are hard-core Rock music and makeup fans, as well as for those who are looking for something with everything in it.
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