Wong Kar Wai for Shu Uemura holidays - Burning in Water palette

I've been captivated by the imagery of the new Shu Uemura holiday collection ever since the first pictures came out. The collaboration with Wong Kar Wai is everything holiday makeup should be: there's sparkle, gold, blue, red, gorgeous lashes and the stunning aesthetic concepts one is used from Wong Kar Wai (at this point I should probably disclose that I am a HUGE fan of WKW's films, especially his collaborations with Christopher Doyle). I went to SpaceNK today because I had my card with ndulge incentives about to expire and I was ecstatic when I saw they had the collection in stock. I left with the Flashing Gold mini brush set and the Burning in Water palette. Even the boxes they came in are beautiful:

Let's talk about the palette today, I'll review the brush set tomorrow after I try it and see how well I can pull off a look using it. Once you open the box you have another nice surprise. The cover features a holographic image of the main look using the blues. I really wanted to show how pretty the cover is so I took some pictures in different angles and my darling hubs made an animated gif of them - let's see how this worked  you need to click to see the animation:

Click on the image above to see the animated gif of the holographic cover

Really rambling on today, onto the makeup, that's why we're here!! The palette includes 4 powder eyeshadows: shimmery royal blue, shimmery lavender, shimmery aqua and a golden glitter; one cream blush (fuchsia) and one glow on blush (pale pink highlighter).  It comes with two decent quality mini double-ended brushes and a big mirror on the inside of the cover.

Wong Kar Wai for Shu Uemura Burning in Water palette

The eyeshadows are smooth and the standard Shu Uemura quality, I really love all the colours, they are so rich and they apply true to colour. The glitter, well it's glitter even if in a pressed form, so if you want to make the colour show up you'll need to layer it (in the swatch below was layered 4 times) but it's very pretty and it only has a bit of fallout. The cream blusher blends really well to a soft pink (again it was layered to show the full potential of the colour). The highlighter is stunning! It's a very flattering pale pink with only a hint of shimmer.

Wong Kar Wai for Shu Uemura Burning in Water palette - swatches

I'm really happy with this palette, you can pull off beautiful looks with it and have a very festive holiday season.  My only comment is that they could skip the mini brushes and give us a bit more quantity, especially for the face colours - the pans are so tiny you need to apply them with fingers or eyeshadow brushes.

The other palette in the collection is not available in SpaceNK, I found some really good swatches of the Drowning in Flames palette in this blog: http://retailtherapy.onsugar.com/Wong-Kar-Wai-Shu-Uemura-Holiday-Collection-2011-Drowning-Flame-Palette-Photos-Swatches-20190338.