Why, Hello Inglot Cosmetics!

While on vacation in London, I was eager to explore European makeup brands (both high end and drug store) in between checking out all the beautiful castles and historic landmarks. :) Inglot Cosmetics was one of the main brands I was most excited about, since they have a wide range of eye shadow colors like MAC. I also received some Reader Requests to share what I think about other makeup brands as well, so this post will be an introduction to this line of makeup that I’ll be using in upcoming looks. This picture shows everything I hauled from the Inglot store at Westfield London (after 2 separate visits haha). The eye shadows shown in the middle are for two palettes — the rest of the eye shadows are already in the palettes.


Although this is my first time buying Inglot products, this brand has been around for over 25 years. Wojtek Inglot, the Polish-based company’s founder, was a young chemist who used to work in Research & Development for a pharmaceutical company. His aim was to combine the most advanced technology and the best possible ingredients and raw materials to produce high quality products at fair prices. Inglot is known for their unique “Freedom System” that allows you to design a palette (of different shapes and sizes) from a huge range of colors in magnetic pans (round, square, or rectangular shaped). One type of palette holds 10 square eye shadows. I bought four of these palettes, shown on the left. They are magnetic and stackable — you can leave the clear palette covers on them like I did on the right, or you can remove the cover in the middle to make the stack lighter.

The two palettes in the picture below on the left are the colors I chose for my mom. She likes dark purples, dark blues, and neutrals, so I was busy swatching colors on the back of my hand to figure out what colors she would like. If you go to an Inglot store to buy something from the Freedom System, they have metal plates that you use to design your palette. When you see a color that you like, you just pick it up and stick it on the plate, like what I’m doing in the picture on the right. When you buy a particular palette, you have to fill it up completely since the price per palette includes all the colors you fit into it.

Below are the two palettes I got for myself — one colorful palette and one neutral palette. You’ll be seeing these colors in future looks. :) These 10 Eye Shadow Square palettes are 35 British Pound Sterling each (about $57 US). Each eye shadow square is 2.7g. They also have this 10 Eye Shadow palette in a round pan version for 32 pounds (about $52 US), but each eye shadow round is only 1.8g (two thirds the size of the square ones). This palette is actually a great deal compared to MAC custom palettes that hold 15 round 1.5g eye shadows. For example, if you get a MAC custom palette ($14.00) and fill it up with only 10 eye shadow pans (at $11.00 each), it’ll cost you $124.00 before tax (vs. ~$52.00 with tax already included and 0.3g more of each eye shadow).

Here’s how the palette looks like empty (left) and how one of the square eye shadows looks like outside of the palette, front and back. The eye shadow pans are magnetic, and they fit securely in the magnetic palette. Just note though that if you do get a palette, the makeup artist will put the pans in the palette for you — I somehow managed to talk them into leaving the pans in the case (so that I could later take pictures of them and assemble the palette myself).

You can even mix and match eye shadows, concealers, blush, etc. in one palette! Here’s another type of palette that holds one blush, one face powder, and three round products (which could be any combination of eye shadows, lipsticks, concealers, brow powders/waxes). I ended up getting a brow powder and two concealer shades, since I wanted this palette to be something I could reach for when I need to get ready in a hurry.

I also got some other items like eyeliner gels and brush cleaner, but I haven’t taken those out of the boxes yet and I want to wait to write about them after I’ve tried them out. From the eye shadows I have tried already, I’m really loving them so far — the color payoff is amazing and they are smooth and really easy to blend (sometimes a little too easy, which could result in making your eye makeup look muddy if you blend too much). The only drawback I’ve encountered so far is that they have limited locations here in the US. They’re even more limited with only one location in all of England! For this reason, MAC still remains a favorite of mine in terms of eye shadow, blush, and lip products since they are more available (and the colors have names instead of numbers like Inglot products, which is very helpful when I share looks on this site!). You can recreate all the looks I do though with similar colors in any brand you like! But if you can get your hands on Inglot products, I highly recommend giving it a try. :)

November 15th, 2010 in Reviews | Share
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