About the Black Radiance Contour Palette…

You know, with all the brands that don’t offer deeper foundations beyond something that would be slightly light on Beyoncé, you can’t NOT support brands whose mission for decades has been to offer shades for a wide range of women of color. Black Radiance (they’re also owned by the same company that owns Wet n’ Wild) has been a brand who has provided good products at very accessible price points. They recently launched a Contour Palette that comes in two variations (or at least at the time that I bought it there were only two): Light to Medium and Medium to Dark.

Sometimes with contour kits, you run into the issue of there being some shades you don’t use. It happened to me with the Anastasia Beverly Hills Contour Kit (which I gave away because one of the side effects of being a beauty blogger is you wind up with more makeup than you could possibly need) and I wound up loving the Cover FX Contour Kit even more than I realized so I was using it up so fast—it wound up making more sense for me to have full sizes of the Cover FX products to highlight and contour. See my updated foundation routine here.

What I love about these is that you will likely use all three slots equally so you really get to maximize the money you spend on these. You might of course have more of the shimmery highlight shade left over just because you won’t use as much product when you use it, but you’ll likely use it just as often as the contour and sculpt shade. Make sense?

The quality of the powders are awesome and they perform well. Not even that they perform well for a $7.99 product, they perform well period.

I actually really like the Black Radiance Contour Palette—it won’t replace what I’m currently using, but I’d definitely take it with me for travel. The Medium to Dark one works for me—I LOVE the “Sculpt” shade—it makes for a great highlight setting powder for me—such a great color and the powder has such a nice satin finish. I typically prefer highlight setting powders with more of a golden undertone—the “Sculpt” shade has more warmth (red) to it but still worked out fine. The “Contour” shade served as more of a subtle contour for me which I liked—it has a reddish warmth to it so it also works amazing as a bronzer for me much like what I use in my current foundation routine. But if you’re slightly darker than me, you might not find the Contour deep enough and if you’re significantly darker than me, you might only be able to use the Sculpt and Highlight shades. Which blows my mind because um, Black Radiance, you make regular pressed powders (like their Ebony shade) that are darker than this so why isn’t there a third deeper palette? Especially considering these contour palettes are coming pretty late in the game—brands are already on the color correcting kit trend and they’re NOW coming out with contour kits :/

I don’t do a lot of the MAC shade comparisons much anymore for a number of reasons, but here it might be a quick and dirty way to help you decide which kit might work for you.

Light to Medium: I’d say this would be good on NC45-ish shades. The “Sculpt” shade might be too dark for a highlight shade on those lighter than say NC40.

Medium to Dark: I’d say this would be good on NC50/NW45-ish shades (although if you’re NC45-ish and want a deeper contour and like the highlight shade, don’t rule this one out). If you’re darker than me, the Contour shade might not be as deep as you want it to be.

Unblended so you can see the sculpt and contour shades:

Listen, the struggle for good natural light in the winter is real…lol. It gets dark super early and I have so much work to do during the day :/

The light in this pic sucks, but just in case someone wanted to see the full look blended out, here it goes:

See more Black Radiance posts here

See more Contouring posts here

See some Highlight Setting Powder options for dark skin here

Bottom line: I think Black Radiance Contour Palette is an amazing product—shades seem to be well thought out and the quality is good. I need them to have two more deeper shades though and a shade lighter than Light to Medium. C’mon, Black Radiance—you can do it!

I’m also thinking that maybe more shades are coming and these are a “test” to see how well the product does for the brand. BR isn’t a brand known for churning out new product often (like say a brand like MAC) so perhaps they want to see how well it does first. Plus you don’t *need* a contour kit to contour. You can read more about that here and here.

Price and where to buy: $7.99 at blackradiancebeauty.com. I bought these online—you might be able to find in stores but I’ve heard a lot of people are having trouble finding them.