Illamasqua Vow pencil

I really am a marketer’s dream, I read a few reviews and watched a couple of YouTube videos recently which mention one of Illamasqua’s medium pencils; Vow, a nude shade which can be used on eyes, lips and face, wherever you like really as a highlighter and particularly in the waterline to brighten your eyes up instead of a white pencil which can give a really stark look. So, needless to say, I had to have one, although I wasn’t exactly sure what I was going to do with it.

I’ve been wanting to try out some Illamasqua products for a while, also based on various reviews, as the colours look fantastic and they are supposed to be pretty good quality, so having a different type of product to try seemed like a good idea for starters.

The pencil was £12.50 and on first impressions it looked like it would be really good, however when I got it home I was slightly disappointed that using it in my waterline wasn’t much better than white at all and still made me look a bit odd, with freaky light lining around my eyes. All was not lost though, I tried it out on my cupid’s bow and around the lip to see how that worked, and it was fantastic! It looks really subtle, not like an obvious line, but it makes my lips look twice the size – in a good way – and properly pouty! A definite winner on that front.

It’s also handy as an under brow highlight, I struggle to get eye shadow to look natural as a highlight and don’t really like to pull it all the way up to my brows anyway, for fear of looking a bit too drag, so a nice thin pencil which can be smudged just under the brow is ideal for me.

Overall, not as successful as I’d hoped but definitely shows promise. Maybe with a bit more trial and error I’ll get it working right on my eyes too.