Tropic Colour Palette – The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

Disclaimer: PR Sample and Affiliate links – I have not been paid for this feature. 

You may remember, way back in April, I shared my initial thoughts on the very exciting new make-up range from Tropic (check out my post here) and the launch I was most excited about was the Tropic Colour Palette, which is a fully-customisable palette that really does offer you the opportunity to pack almost every make-up need into a single palette; we’re talking blushers, highlighters, bronzers, concealers, brows, eyeshadows and even eyeliners – the whole shebang is covered.  It’s a big launch, so I wanted to give it a good go before sharing my thoughts, especially as there are some elements that I think could do with improving, so here’s my annoyingly long and detailed review of the Tropic Colour Palette:

I’ll start with the bad, which for me, falls down to the packaging.  There are two things I don’t like about it, firstly the palette itself has a curved base on the right side, so you always have to buy a curved product to fill the palette with – you can’t just pick up a load of eyeshadows and fill it right up as you will always need one of those slightly larger products to sit within that curved section.  It is such a small thing to focus on, I know this, but I think this palette system could be almost perfect and I don’t know why they’ve added that aspect to limit what you can do.  It doesn’t make sense to me and I thought I’d mention it.

The second minor issue with the packaging is the fact that there are three elements to building your palette: you have the palette itself, the products themselves and the magnets that hold the products into the palette.  I don’t really know why the products couldn’t sit within a magnet, I’m sure there’s a reason here that I’m not aware of, but it means that they whole process of swapping products is very fiddly, and if you’re like me and a bit clumsy, you will almost certainly stick your finger in at least one powder or cream as you swap them over.  My gut feels that there must be an easier way to make this work, as at the moment you have to find something to put in the hole at the back of the magnet to pop out the product.

Now onto the “ugly” bits, starting with the price point.  Just say you wanted to dip your toe in and buy yourself the starter palette with magnets and one eyeshadow, that’s £24.  If you want to get a full palette, so five eyeshadows and the annoyingly obligatory powder to sit in the curve, that’s £68.  £68 for five eyeshadows, powder and a palette with removable magnets.  I appreciate there will be plenty of people who will think nothing of spending that kind of money on a palette like this, it is a starter kit after all, and as you go along and make changes you can substitute various products and this, as a long-term experience, does work out cheaper – you can keep adapting your palette to meet your needs and that is very handy.

The final moan is thanks to the fact that you’re not supplied any way to store the products that you’re not keeping within the palette; so just say I had a set of eyeshadows and a powder as mentioned above, and I decided to add an eyeliner and brow powder and take out some of the aforementioned eyeshadows – what do I do with the eyeshadows?! These are now completely exposed with no lid or packaging available; yes I could place them back in the packaging they came in, or use the packaging from the newest additions, but it’s not the easiest or most effective way to store them and this could quickly be fixed by adding little lids that you can then transfer from one product to another, that really would provide protection.

Okay, so that’s a lot of critiquing, but the main reason I’ve gone into such detail is because I feel this is a product that is just shy of amazing.  I absolutely love the entire concept and I think it’s a very smart product that, with a couple of minor tweaks, could answer a lot of beauty problems.  So now onto The Good! First up, and most importantly, the actual products – the powders and creams – are gorgeous (in fairness, as is most of the make-up range, more on that soon) and I especially love the colour ranges available.  This is the sort of product that you could take a lot of pleasure from planning and slowly building, then tweaking whenever you fancy mixing things up a bit – it’s kind of like a charm bracelet, but for make-up, as you can just add a new single item to give it a total refresh and feel like you have a new palette.

I mentioned earlier that that product elements are one of the most exciting parts of this launch and I think this is where Tropic have nailed it beyond what most other bespoke palettes offer, as so many just give you eyeshadows and maybe blushers or highlighters, but everything is covered here, you’d just need a base product (although they do concealer elements, so if you’re travelling and can get away without foundation then you’re sorted), mascara, and possibly something for the lips – although if you’ve chosen a cream blusher then that could address lips too, so you have a palette that really is a great way to keep everything to an absolute minimum.

Weirdly, after the huge initial outlay, it then becomes very cost-effective to add bits and bobs as you go along.  As I’ve said earlier, this is an investment product.  I do love a lot about the Tropic Colour Palette and I think it’s fantastic that you can go from a completely cream palette to a completely powder palette in a few steps, or mix it up until you have your perfect combination.  The palette above is a great example of what really works for this palette concept, as I could not love those shades more and I can see myself reaching for the palette all the time because it’s very ‘me’, and that’s the key here, creating a palette that really does it for you.  The whole range is out now and you can find various combinations to start you off by heading here – link.

UPDATE:

Tropic were extremely responsive to my feedback which I always find very reassuring from a brand  A couple of points they have raised in their response: 

• The palette comes with magnetic trays as these can be continuously re-used and ultimately kept forever (by popping in different pans), whilst the pans themselves are aluminium so can be infinitely recycled making things more eco-friendly. If the pans/trays were to be combined so the pans themselves were magnetic they wouldn’t be able to be recycled as effectively
• The Colour Palette has been designed to house a full face of colour cosmetics in just one sleek palette, meaning you don’t have to carry around full sizes of each product, each in separate packaging. You can choose from bronzers, blushers, highlighters, contour, eyeshadows, liners and brow products, each of which is a full size product, meaning that they will last as long as if they were purchased individually and so the prices reflect this. The bonus is that you can keep your Colour Palette Case and Trays forever, so never have to pay the full £68 again unless you treat yourself to a completely new look.