This post is a review of the Nars Hot Escape Palette, but I think it’s also a good opportunity to discuss how much value (if any) face palettes truly add to a makeup collection. I didn’t include any face palettes in my Project Pan, since I didn’t think I had an overconsumption issue in that category, but my ever growing Hourglass collection has made me feel the need to reconsider this. In addition, my Project Pan was centered around trying to use my absolute top favorite makeup items, and so few face palettes would have even ranked high enough to be included.

Nars Hot Escape Cheek Palette in (Version III) Medium Deep

In the last few years, I’ve begun to think that face palettes aren’t something I should be buying, considering how infrequently I use them. The reason I made an exception for this Nars palette is because I thought the blush shades looked quite pretty and I have never tried a true Nars highlighter before. I have technically only used pale shimmery blushes from Nars as highlighters that came within their blush palettes, so I’ve been curious about the potential differences.

The highlighters from the Hot Escape palettes are what tempted me the most because shortly after this launch, Nars had also released their Light Reflecting Luminizing Powders. I wanted to try those as well, but I feared Ophelia would be too light and Total Eclipse might be too dark. Skinny Dip from this palette looked like it was right in-between those two and would be a closer shade match for me. I also assumed the formulas would be the same between the Light Reflecting Luminizing Powders and the highlighters in the Hot Escape Cheek Palettes because Volumes 1, 2, and 4 share the same names (Ophelia, Electra, and Total Eclipse). As it turns out, the highlighter formulas are not the same and the colors don’t seem to be correct either! Ophelia as an individual highlighter is the fourth darkest color and is a light bronze tone. The “Ophelia” from the Hot Escape Palette looks more like the shade Heavenly and is described as an opalescent pink. It’s even in the lightest palette to boot. So, I’m not sure why Nars would do something so confusing. Perhaps it was not intentional and an employee made a mistake when preparing the names for the packaging labels.

The confusion doesn’t stop there. Even though the ingredient lists are the same for the bronzers, I noticed Laguna 06 in the Hot Escape palette seemed much lighter than the individual shade I have in the mini size. I hope the differences are clear enough in the swatch photo below.

The thought crossed my mind that my mini could be darker because I’ve had it for longer, but the surface of mine is actually still lighter than normal because of how often I mixed Laguna shades 05 and 06 because of how red toned 06 was from the start! So, my mini of 06 will look even darker than the new one once I use it a few more times solo.
I don’t know why these two are different, and can only suspect they were made in different facilities even though they both say they’re made in the USA. It’s also possible Nars decided to tweak the shade a little in the palette, which doesn’t seem farfetched considering what they did with the Ophelia highlighter.
I actually don’t mind the new 06 bronzer being lighter and less red because it suits my complexion better. The quality and performance seems to be about the same as well. It’s still a buildable formula and long lasting. I wish it wasn’t quite so matte though.

Starting with the blush called Obsession, I think it’s a pretty color, but it having a matte finish is preventing me from liking it more. As much as I’m attracted to blush colors by Nars, and like them, them looking slightly dry on me is always the reason I don’t fall in love with them. It’s something I could never make sense of considering MAC’s matte powder blushes look similar to the Nars ones, yet the MAC blushes melt better into my skin and somehow just look more life-like and healthier. I have to say, Obsession still looks better on my skin than some of the Nars blushes I’ve used in the past. So, this isn’t quite a favorite, but I am happy enough to have it.

Night Swim turned out to be a little more berry toned than I expected, which is a color category I can be very picky about. Because it’s a lighter berry, that helps me to like it more, as I feel deep colored blushes can age me. It certainly doesn’t look drying due to the shimmer, but the reflect is a little metallic, and I’m not really a fan of that. It’s not enough to make me dislike the blush, just that it prevents it from being a favorite. I think I still like this color even more than Obsession!

My skin tone and everything else (except the blush) is more color accurate in the photo with the pink shirt. It was a cloudy day in my grey shirt photo, so everything looks greyer and cooler, but the blush color is more accurate.

The Skinny Dip highlighter is a suitable color for me, as I suspected it would be. My favorite highlighter brush picks up quite a bit of product, so I have to be careful how much I apply because a little goes a long way. In terms of intensity, it already reaches medium with the amount my brush picks up, so I don’t try to layer it further. It’s already a lot more than I’ve been wearing lately, outside of testing days.

The blue shirt photo is more color accurate for Obsession and Skinny Dip, but I wanted to show how the photo turned out on a cloudy day to better help show the difference in Night Swim’s cloudy photo.

Skinny Dip is not as refined as my Hindash, Charlotte Tilbury, or Prada highlighters, but it still has small enough shimmer particles to keep me happy. I don’t like when highlighters have shimmer specks large enough to look like glitter or when they’re spaced out too much and it looks more like accidental fallout rather than intentional. This highlighter is smooth enough to avoid leaving a stripe and blends nicely. The glow it gives isn’t that metallic either, though I suspect the newest individual ones could be. Overall, I’m quite pleased with this highlighter. This and the blush Night Swim are my favorite two products in the quad.

Because I can use all four colors and I like them all, this has a higher percentage of success rate among my face palette purchases. It also helps that I got it on sale for 33 Euros ($40 USD). However, I don’t know that I love it enough to reach for it over my individual makeup favorites. So, this might not have been a good purchase for me after all. I can at least recommend it as a good quality product for those that enjoy Nars cheek powders and past palettes, even if it’s something I personally could have skipped.

Returning back to the subject of whether face palettes are worth it, I have to state that I first of all consider a face palette to be a product with at least one highlighter, blush, and bronzer. So, duos, blush palettes, and something that has for instance only a highlighter, bronzer, and face powder is one that I don’t consider a true face palette. I don’t always use contour or face powders in a makeup look, but I almost always wear blush, highlighter, and bronzer. This is why I clasisfy face palettes this way.

I own more face palettes than is pictured above, but they are the only ones I considered worth bringing with me or buying once I moved. I would like to point out one of the palettes is custom and the one from Lethal Cosmetics used to qualify, but I prefer their highlighter and blush quality, so I replaced the bronzer with another highlighter.

The first point in determining whether a face palette is worth it is remembering the rule of thumb that the more shades it contains that suit someone, the more it’s worth. It is rare that I like every single face product in palettes, or that I can even use all of them. If a palette doesn’t have magnetic pans or a way to make it easy to mix and match for more options, it makes that product pretty much permanently imperfect. That limits how often I want to reach for it.
If there are premade, but customizable options, I have to consider the price and quality to determine if buying 2 or more palettes to create one perfect palette is really worth it.

The second thing to consider is whether there is even a single face palette that has quality that I consider a holy grail.
It’s one thing to have all usable products in nice shades, but can they even compete with my single blushes, highlighters, and bronzers as individual singles? Plus, there are some brands that use cheaper formulas in multi-functional palettes and sets (i.e., Too Faced holiday items allegedly). So, you might pay less than what the premium products would individually total up to, but it’s not a true deal if the quality is lower.
An example of this is when I had a few Tarte holiday sets containing mini blushes in a different formula versus their specifically labeled “Amazonian Clay” mini blushes set. The random blush formula was nice, but couldn’t compare to their claim to fame Amazonian ones, so I eventually decluttered them.

Within the Hourglass Ambient range, the At Night blush and finishing powders were once holy grails for me, but nothing else of theirs comes close. I wish the bronzers had a stronger sheen and the highlighters tend to be pretty, but have either too large of shimmer particles (even medium size is a lot to me) or too strong of a metallic reflect. There was a time that I considered their finishing powders to be unique, until Nikki told me about the Candleglow Sheer Perfecting Powders from Laura Mercier. As of late, the Ilia Soft Blurring Blushes (and I’ve heard even Kosas Baked Blushes) are giving Hourglass a run for their money.
Still, I do use my Hourglass palettes a fair amount specifically because they are near-holy grails in terms of formula and because I depotted and rearranged many of them. I know I wouldn’t reach for them enough if not for these two factors combined. Proof of that is the fact that I still left some of my palettes behind in the US.

I have four other blush and highlighter palettes from Nars (one of them is unreviewed), yet I still chose to keep a few of my individual Nars blushes instead of bringing those with me. I find that to be quite telling.

The Sephora Collection Microsmooth Multi-Tasking Baked Face Palette contains all beautiful colors, but the matte blush and bronzer are a little too matte and dry looking for me since moving to a different climate. That’s the main reason I don’t use it anymore.

The MAC Effervescence Extra Dimension Face Compact has baked gelee powders with shimmer or sheen, so my only excuse for not using it as soon as it was back in my possession is that I was in the midst of my Project Pan. It has only been a week since I started using it again.
The Sephora and MAC palettes have the highest chance of being favorites again because every shade in them work on me and have the kinds of tones I like.

Although I don’t consider the Hindash matte powder products to be more amazing than many of my matte blushes and bronzers, the brand makes my favorite and most used contour that’s within the Beautopsy palette. Plus, it’s really the tones and convenience of the powders being so multi-functional that causes me to continually reach for Beautopsy, especially when traveling. However, I haven’t stopped wanting to swap around Beautopsy and Monochromance shades to turn it into a perfect palette. Even if I did so, the next thing I would yearn for is to have a powder highlighter in that pan size, because that’s something I’m still missing to consider it a true face palette in my mind. So, this is why I haven’t bothered to depot and rearrange them yet.

My custom magnetic palette filled with face products also gets used a fair amount, specifically because my number one bronzer is in there. If I added my Prada highlighter and a MAC blush, I might seriously use that multiple times a week!
But this highlights my realization about face palettes: Every powder in there has to be a perfectly suiting tone for me, plus in a formula that is an absolute favorite.
So, I will have to either make my own custom face palette out of products from various brands in order to have one that I’ll use a ton, or I’ll have to commit to only buying new face palettes matching very high criteria in order for them to feel worth it.

I have come to this realization, but two things are in the forefront of my mind.
The first is that in the midst of working on the initial draft of this post, I technically already bought another face palette (the YSL All Hours Couture Face Palette), but it’s more of a blush/highlighter palette for me. So, it technically doesn’t count?
The second is that I am absolutely going to buy the Hourglass Ambient Light Fox Palette when it launches for the holidays. I have already established that this isn’t a holy grail formula, yet I am so hellbent on creating (through depotting) my ultimate Hourglass palette to somehow make it feel like I have finally reached perfection, which would finally make them all worth buying in my mind. In reality, I should quit while I’m behind, but this is a guilty pleasure of mine. I guess I can continue to make an exception for Hourglass.

Those are all my thoughts on face palettes, plus the Nars review. I hope it has been helpful!

-Lili ❤