Maychiri's Thoughts

Wet n Wild Star Lux Starlighter Brush [1111971E] Review

May 26, 2023

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Wet n Wild Star Lux Glitter Highlighter Duo [1111970E - Now or Nova] Review

May 26, 2023

Alright, let’s start the Star Lux LE off with this interesting product! This is the Wet n Wild Star Lux Glitter Highlighter Duo, shade 1111970E/Now or Nova (cool name!).

Okay, so, BIPA is pretty much one of the only places where you can find Wet n Wild LEs here. So that’s where I found this star-studded LE! It had plenty of amazing looking products, but I figured a little too late that I wanted a whole bunch of them. I kept staring at this highlighter every time I visited BIPA, because the starry side just confused me. Like, what would I ever do with these tiny stars inside the left shade? But it was too cute. And I love cute stuff, so I bought it, because it was just too weird and I had to know what it looks like for real! Obviously, at least one shade is way too dark to be a highlighter for my skin, but at least I got the stars! So, did this highlighter just confuse me further? Is it any good? Let’s see!

Packaging: a very simple plastic case. It does feels a bit cheap and flimsy, but it’s not too bad. I love the peachy colour! And just look at the stars and constellations on the lid! It’s adorable! And perfectly fitting for this LE! The white text is the perfect choice I think! I makes it look more modern and elegant. The lid closes very tightly, even if it does seem flimsy. Looks can be deceiving!

Ingredients: since it’s two different products in one, a glitter and a highlighter, their ingredients list differs. Highlighter: phytosteryl macadamiate, vitamin E for nourishment. No parabens. Glitter: glycerine, African baobab (Adansonia digitata) seed oil, watermelon (Citrullus lanatus) seed oil, vitamin E, macula (Sclerocarya birrea) seed oil, tallow wood (Ximenia americana) seed oil, soy (Glycine soja) oil for nourishment. No parabens. So, the glitter is way more nourishing than the highlighter. Just look at all the oils in it! I guess you need it to counter the sharp plastic and keep it from falling off. The scent is quite subtle and not unpleasant. It smells vaguely soapy. Both sides smell the same. The expiration date is 18 months after opening.

Colour: duo colour! The highlighter is quite dark for me; it’s a coppery bronze colour with a rosy shimmer. It would probably look great on darker skin. I guess I will have to try to use it as blush? Although it is way too shimmery for a blush. Shame, as it is truly a gorgeous colour. The glitter topper is light golden/champagne coloured, which is way more appropriate for my pale skin. It’s got multicolour shimmer thrown in to make it more shimmery. The stars are... iridescent? Like, depending on the light, they are either yellow, red, or green. So, they will definitely be noticeable! This looks like a great topper colour for the copper/bronze! Very good choice of colours! Albeit way too dark for my pale skin! Both this and the only other shade were too dark, so it wouldn’t have changed things if I had bought the other shade.

The formula of the highlighter is sublime! It’s so wonderfully soft, so much that it feels almost creamy. It’s not at all powdery, either. This makes it super easy to apply, but try to have a light hand, as this thing is intense! But I’ll get to that. This formula blends into the skin and, despite being so metallic, doesn’t exaggerate the texture of the skin. It just looks soft on skin, matching how soft it feels. It is somewhat buildable, like, you can make it a bit more intense, but it not by much, as it is already very intense.

This is such a phenomenal formula for oily skin, and here I thought it wouldn’t be good! What a surprise! The glitter topper, on the other hand, feels very oily and a bit greasy. Not surprising, given the various oils added to it. It is a bit sparse, so it always ends up looking uneven and rough. It is a fair bit more difficult to work with, compared to the highlighter. It just looks kinda cheap without the stars. Although it looks okay on top of the highlighter.

This is a topper, so it was meant to be used on top of the highlighter, so no wonder that’s when it looks best. On its own it looks like it is sitting on top of the skin, not like it is blending with the skin’s texture. The stars are plastic. You take them and stick them where you want them to be. They stick very well to the highlighter and glitter. There’s really nothing more you can do with them, besides just placing them on the skin wherever. The highlighter is the easier one to blend of the two.

It blends pretty easily, although not as much as I would like it. I advise caution with how you apply it! Even though it usually has some uneven areas, they aren’t too hard to blend out. The glitter is surprisingly easy to blend, given how sparkly it is. It’s the creamy, oily formula that allows it to be blended out. Although it will stay uneven and coarse looking even if you blend it out.

The pigmentation is extremely intense, both in the highlighter and in the glitter. The highlighter is so intensely pigmented that you really have to be careful how you apply it! It’s really easy to put way too much of it and end up looking too orange! So, gentle strokes. Don’t have a heavy hand. The glitter is also extremely pigmented, but it is more forgiving because it is light golden and much more sparse. In terms of how shiny it is, it’s two different types of shine between the highlighter and glitter. The highlighter is so finely shimmery that it is actually metallic. So it has a kind of soft shine to it. Very pretty. While it is coppery, the shine is more rose than copper. So it ends up being a very nicely matched combo of copper and rose pink.

I love that it’s actually not extremely shiny, this makes the highlighter all that more versatile! And it looks better on skin, too, than if it were very sparkly. The glitter is exactly that kind of sparkly shimmer. It’s got multicolour shimmer that is quite large so it sparkles so much more than the highlighter. Although it isn’t nearly as shiny when you blend it out. It does seem like the perfect complement to the metallic highlighter. The highlighter is way too dark to be used as, well, highlighter, on my skin. I tried using it as a blush, and, well, I guess it could have looked worse.

The problem is that it is far too metallic to be used as blush. This kind of finish isn’t too good when it’s used on skin that has large pores, like near the nose or the main part of the cheeks. I mean, it kind of looks okay, but it’s plainly visible that this is not blush. The stars are also just... what? Like, I put a dozen of them on each cheekbone, and, while it does look kinda cute, I am just confused by it. I just don’t know what to do with them. I do admit that it does add a very interesting detail when you put on the stars.

Both the highlighter and the glitter are almost equally comfortable to wear. The highlighter is slightly more comfortable due to having this wonderful soft, creamy formula. It melts into the skin so much that you cannot even feel it! The glitter is heavy and oily and too creamy at first, quite uncomfortable. But it, too, melts into the skin, becoming unnoticeable. The stars are sharp; they are plastic after all! But only if you place them sideways, so that the edges are poking the skin. If you place them flat against the skin they also feel weightless. I don’t feel them on my cheekbones, even though I’ve got like 20 on each cheekbone! I didn’t think the highlighter would feel this comfortable, because it feels so heavy and oily. Nice surprise!

I must say that the longevity is very good, with both the highlighter and the glitter. The glitter is more durable, though, as it doesn’t show any signs of deterioration throughout the day. Even 8 hours later it still looks pretty much the same. The stars, I mean, they’re plastic so they will, by nature, be the most durable of the products here. I love that they don’t disperse all over the face throughout the day but stay firmly in place, exactly where you put them. I honestly expected them to misbehave and that I would find them everywhere but where they were supposed to be. The fact that they don’t gives me peace of mind. Lastly, the highlighter itself. It’s not as long-lasting as most highlighters are on my skin; I noticed that it had faded in some parts and that my skin’s sebum is slowly starting to break it.

It is still in good shape, but not nearly as good as most other highlighters. So, yeah, not for oily skin, it seems, even though it looks really good on it.

Just as a side note, the stars are only on the surface of the glitter, so there’s not really a lot of them. After you use up the surface layer you won’t have any stars anymore. Bizarre, I thought they would be mixed in. So, be careful how many you apply at once if you want to have them for a long time.

Thank goodness it is this easy to remove! It comes off easily even when you use only micellar water, yes, even the glitter! Although, I would highly suggest using a wash gel or something similar because the shimmer likes to explode and go everywhere. As do the little stars! When I went to remove this highlighter I happened to find one star stuck to the top of my ear! So, yeah, it goes everywhere if you only use micellar water! The stars are plastic so I understand why they go flying off wherever.

All in all, colour me surprised, but this highlighter/glitter duo isn’t actually all too bad! I had zero hopes it would look good, honestly, both because it is way too dark for me to be used properly and because I just didn’t know what to do with the stars. The stars are the primary reason why I bought this in the first place. They were sooo cute! And that was quite the short-sighted decision to make. Like, yeah, they are cute, but what are you going to do with them? Are you actually going to use them, even? Anyways, now that I have used the duo I can say that it is better than I expected it to be. The highlighter is much too dark for me so I had to resort to using it as blush. Which wasn’t the most terrible idea ever, but it also wasn’t the greatest. Its metallic texture is fine, great even, for a highlighter, but it’s just way too metallic for a blush. It can make the skin look too shiny and plastic even, and can sometimes make pores look larger, especially the closer you get to the nose. The colour is also far too bronzey/coppery for a blush, for my tastes. But its formula is divine! It’s so extremely soft and light and applies like a charm! It blends perfectly with the skin’s natural textures. I thought it would be more of a coarse formula, or maybe even a powdery formula with a lot of fall-out; this is so much better! The glitter isn’t as fantastic as the highlighter; it looks uneven and coarse and just kind of cheap, at least when used without the stars. It’s also extremely oily and heavy feeling, although that tends to disappear within like 20 minutes. And it doesn’t blend all that well, either. It looks best when you combine the two, and put the glitter topper on top if the highlighter. That way the flaws of each one are concealed by the strengths of both. Too bad that the longevity isn’t too spectacular, especially with the highlighter. It fades and breaks under sebum, so it’s not the best choice for oily skin. Now, you might have noticed that there’s a conspicuous absence of the stars in this conclusion. I wanted to leave them for last. They are plastic stars, with sharp edges. Although, they do not feel sharp if you place them flat against the skin. But the question remains, why? I mean I guess if you have a LE themed around stars you should have something starry, but isn’t the glitter topper glittery/sparkly enough? And stars are sparkly, so that matches the theme. But they went and added literal plastic stars. I guess you cannot get more literal than this! Look, the stars are fine in their own right, but I just don’t know how to include them in the standard way I do makeup. I’ve never been one for like tons of plastic glitter on your cheeks or whatever. I will admit that I love how they change colour depending on the angle, from green to red to light yellow. It’s really mesmerising. But anyways, to me, they just look odd, no matter where I place them. Cute, yes? Maybe? But also odd. Call me a magpie because shiny things attract me and boy are these stars shiny. If only Wet n Wild made a lighter shade for us pale people; both were entirely too dark (NB: I only later realised that there was, in fact, a light shade, but BIPA did not stock it so the point is moot anyways). In any case, I love the way this duo looks on skin (I suppose Stockholm syndrome will force me to love the stars). So I would recommend it to those who love big glitter or have medium dark skin. It must be so lovely on dark skin! For me, it is sadly, ill-fitting.

Rating: 7.5/10

Would buy again? NO, too dark and the stars are ???