L'oreal True Match Lumi Powder Glow Illuminator Review and Swatches

L'oreal True Match Lumi Powder Glow Illuminator ($12.99 at drugstores) is a brand new powder highlighter compact that comes in three shades to suit any skintone. I found these at Rite Aid, but I've heard from readers who have spotted these at Target and CVS as well. Let's take a look...

The packaging is so pretty...I'm a total sucker for rose gold anything. They come in clamshell compacts with a see-through lid and pretty rose gold accents. There are three available shades...Golden, Rose and Ice. Golden enhances the yellow or peach tones in warm-toned skin, Ice enhances pink or blue tones in cool-toned skin, and Rose compliments all skin tones. Since I have cool-toned skin, I picked up Ice and Rose.

Each compact has four complimentary highlight shades inside. There are no instructions on the packaging as far as whether you're supposed to swirl all of the colors together or if you're supposed to use a certain shade on a certain part of your face...so I wasn't 100% sure how I wanted to use this. I'm not the most creative person when it comes to makeup, so I usually like when a product gives "suggested uses" so I know what I'm doing.

The bottom of the compact opens to reveal a mirror and small flat brush. This is one time when I actually don't mind the smaller-sized brush that comes with a product! I mean, I couldn't use this for all-over face application, but it works great for highlighting along the tops of my cheekbones and other small areas of my face.

The packaging says that you can use this all over your face or as a highlighter and shows a little diagram of the areas to highlight. I can tell you  right up front that this powder is not one for using all over your face...I'll explain more about that below.

The Ice (C302) palette contains cooler shades of tan, off-white, lavender, and baby blue, and when swirled together, they give off a very soft lavender-white shade. In that regard, it sort of reminds me of that new Too Faced palette with the Selfie powders in it...there's a lavender powder in there that's supposed to give a soft, ethereal glow to the skin. But this palette has a lot more shimmer than the Too Faced one does, since these are actually highlighters.

Here, I swatched each shade individually, then swirled them together (right side of the photo) so you could see what they look like combined.

Clockwise from left: Tan, off-white, lavender, baby blue, swirled together.

The neutral Rose (N202) palette has pretty shades of cream, pink, gold, and peach. Like the Ice palette, all of the shades have quite a bit of shimmer to them. 

I did the same thing here, swatching each shade in the palette clockwise starting with the largest shade on the left, then combined them all at the end. When swirled together, the colors make a light peachy pink shade.

Clockwise from left: Cream, Pink, Gold, Peach, swirled together.

Here I am wearing Ice on top of my cheekbones (all shades swirled together). It's very shimmery and noticeable which is fine in small quantities but definitely not all over your face unless you want the dreaded "Disco Ball" effect.

Wearing True Match Lumi Powder Glow in Ice

Here, you can get a sense of how shimmery these are compared to two very popular illuminating face powders...Mary Lou Manizer from The Balm and the Hourglass Ambient Light in Dim Light. See how chunky the L'oreal one seems next to the other two? Out of all three, the only one I wear all over my face is the Hourglass Ambient Lighting powder because it's so finely milled and smooth and the shimmer particles are so small they're not obvious. The Balm's Mary Lou Manizer is one of my favorite highlighters and even though I generally don't use it all over, it's still much smoother and less shimmery than the L'oreal True Match Lumi powder.

Overall, on the positive side, they're nicely packaged, the powder is soft and pigmented, and the shades are beautiful and are great for highlighting your face.

But on the negative side, I was not able to use these as an all over illuminating face powder due to the large amount of shimmer in these. A little on the tops of my cheeks, or strategically places areas is fine, but I'm just not okay with my entire face looking that glowy. 
So what do you think of these new powders? Are they what you were expecting? Tried them yet?

Currently, these are BOGO 50% at Ulta, so you can get them both for $19.49!