Tarte Rainforest of the Sea Kiss & Blush Cream Cheek & Lip Palette | First Impression

I just got the Tarte Rainforest of the Sea Kiss & Blush Cream Cheek & Lip Palette from the Tarte friends and family sale and I wanted to hurry and get a first impression/swatch post up before the sale ends tomorrow in case any of you guys were curious about buying it!

This palette costs $42 but you can get it for $29.40 with code FNF at tartecosmetics.com through tomorrow, 7/27.

Let's take a look!

This palette is really gorgeous in person- it's bright pink with gold and lavender sand dollars printed on the front. The back and inside of the palette is a shiny gold plastic and the pans are arranged in a circle with a highlighter in the center.
It's the same size and setup as the Tartiest Contour Palette and the Wipeout Color Correcting Palette. I don't have either one of those, but for reference, here it is next to the Rainforest of the Sea Eyeshadow Palette and the Tartelette in Bloom palette. It's actually quite large and holds a lot of product!

Inside, there's a large mirror, five cream blush/lipsticks, and one cream highlight. There's a plastic sheet that comes inside the palette that has the shade names on it, so they aren't printed anywhere inside. I wonder why Tarte decided not to put them in the palette like they did with the Rainforest Eyeshadow Palette? It's nice to be able to see the shade names at a glance without having to hang on to that plastic sheet.

This palette has a beautiful range of shades, including pink, nude, peach, mauve, and berry, plus a pearl highlighter. I'm normally not a fan of products that claim to be used on both lips and cheeks. Usually they work fine for my cheeks but have a strange dry texture when applied to the lips.

So of course, I applied one of the shades to my lips first, expecting to hate it and move on to my cheeks, but I was completely surprised by it! The texture is soft, creamy and silky and it felt really nice on my lips...like a moisturizing lipstick. Plus it gave amazing coverage...these are highly pigmented. They have a beautiful satin finish, which will satisfy those of you who don't like glosses and also those of you who aren't crazy about mattes.

Because they felt so emollient on my lips, I expected them to feel greasy on my cheeks but again, this palette totally surprised me! I swirled my finger around in the pan and went to dab it on my cheeks and my skin just started to suck it right in. So I had to work very quickly to blend it out before it dried. A minute later, I could run my fingers over my cheek and not even feel like I put anything on them (note...I have dry skin. If you're oily, you may have a different experience). I also love that these don't contain any shimmer (but you can use the highlight shade to add it if you want to). They look very natural on the skin once they're blended out and don't accentuate your pores.

The only exception was the highlight shade, Cloud 9. For some reason, that did feel a little greasy on my cheeks. But to be fair, it may be because I put a lot of it on...I had trouble getting it to show up on my skin tone, plus it's more sheer than the blushes. I think deeper skin tones will be able to use less and maybe then it won't feel as greasy as it did on me.

You can see in the swatches how pigmented these are in one swipe! I'm absolutely loving the color selection...you have more neutral shades, a fun pink shade, and a dramatic evening shade.

Overall, the Tarte Kiss & Blush Cream palette is really impressing me so far! I applied the shade Butterflies to my lips and cheeks at 4pm and it's now 10pm and they're both still going strong (the color stained my lips but I can't feel it on them anymore).

If you're thinking about getting this palette, grab it now while the Tarte 30% off sale is still going on (use code FNF). 



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