Charlotte Tilbury Hollywood Instant Look In A Palette – Pretty, Glowing Beauty Review
The holidays are just around the corner and Charlotte Tilbury released a bunch of their holiday palettes and kits to celebrate. One of their famous palettes I’ve always wanted to try which they discontinued for a few years was their Instant Look in a Palette, and finally for 2025 they released a couple new ones. I decided to go for the lighter palette called “Pretty, Glowing Beauty”. And unfortunately the palette didn’t really live up to the high expectations I had for it. You can pick up the Charlotte Tilbury Hollywood Instant Look In a Palette for $111AUD from Charlotte Tilbury or Mecca or for $69USD from Nordstrom, Revolve or Sephora US.
Quick overview of the palette, it consists of three eyeshadows that can create a complete eye look from lid, crease to shadow / liner. Then comes two face powders, a lighter shade and bronzer which can help provide warmth and a bit of contour to the face (which is how I used it) and finally two cheek powders, a standard matte blush and then a highlighter.
First and foremost, I love a good face palette because of the lazy makeup girlie in me loves that I don’t need to grab multiple items to do my makeup in the morning and I will say I really loved the face powders, they worked great for me. Unfortunately the main issue I had with this palette is the inconsistent pigmentation of a couple of the shades here. Generally the matte shades performed well and looked great on the face, but two of the more shimmery shades really fell short. For example the cheek highlighter was simply not pigmented enough in comparison to the matte blush which had great colour pay off so when used together it really feels like the combination falls flat and doesn’t bode well together which was really disappointing as I think the colours work really well together on the palette.
The other issue I had was with the first eyeshadow shade 1, which mostly felt like chunky glitter and little actual pigmentation which meant no only did I not get the nice colour payoff I was hoping for, but I had some level of fall out I needed to remove. Nothing wrong with chunky glitter if that’s what the intent is, but any shadow that has glitter does require a more adhesive primer which the rest of the shadows wouldn’t so it seems weird to me that it wouldn’t be something a little more finely milled to work together with the rest of the shadows.
That said, as I mentioned before the matte shades has excellent colour pay off and had decent longevity for the day. The colour story themselves is beautiful and compliments each other well. And the packaging itself felt very glamourous, the exterior is made of a fabric like metallic foil so whilst it felt to hold, I wouldn’t trust throwing this palette into a bag full of dirty brushes and expect it to stay as pristine as it appears.
So would I recommend this palette? Honestly probably not given for such an expensive price I’d expect all shades to perform equally as good. However now that I have it will I put it aside for a better palette? Nope, because I still really love using the shades that do work, that and I just love how this palette lays out and really want to love it so I’ll likely continue to persist with it to try and make every shade work for me.
