MAC Raver Girl Palette, Lipsticks and Lipglasses in Action

I’m an NC42, and I’m in my 40s, and the last rave I went to was on New Year’s Eve in 2001 (OMG!), but I still have a thing or two to say about all of the purples in the new MAC Girls Raver Girl Palette, Lipsticks and Lipglasses, which I took for a spin today. Raver Girl is one of three new MAC Girls mini-collections.

First question: What does purple have to do with raves or raving? Is it an influential color among dancing kids? Back in my day (she said, immediately dating herself), it was all about dayglow everything and massive quantities of glitter.

If you’re a young whippersnapper, would you please break it down for me? I’m genuinely intrigued.

I recognize that this could have been user error, because I’m out of practice wearing dark colors in my crease, but I feel like Rave-Cave and Wild Card, the dark purples in the $41 Raver Girl Palette, aren’t easy to blend out. I used a pencil brush to apply both of them in the outer corner and within the crease on my hooded lids to deepen my eyes, and then I feathered the edges with bright purple 120 BPM.

Some parts ended up looking less blended and patchy than others. In the future when I wear this palette — and I will wear it again because I do like it, even with my blending issues with the darker shadows (which, like I said, could just be a matter of me needing to practice) — I’ll stick to using those shades as liners.

It’s weird, but it seems like every time MAC comes out with a new batch of MAC Girls products they change and evolve the formulas, because they get better and better with each new iteration. The last batch of Girls palettes were just messy and kicked up so much powder, but that didn’t happen this time with Raver Girl. I experienced hardly any fallout or messiness from the Raver Girls shadows at all, and the mid-toned and lighter colors were a breeze to blend, which was great!

I was worried that the purples in Raver Girl would irritate my sensitive eyes, because my eyes would water all day long when I wore older versions of the Girls Palettes (especially ones with purple), but I mushed and smudged dark purple Wild Card like BAM-BAM-BAM on my upper lash line and had no problems with it. And I REALLY got in there, man.

Bottom line: Raver Girl is good — like really, really good — and if the other two palettes (Smarty Pants and Pretty Punk) are of similar quality, this will be the best batch of MAC Girls yet.

There are also two Raver Girl Lipsticks and two Lipglasses (sold separately from the palette), and I feel silly in all of them except hot pink Bracelets Galore gloss. The others are a tad too frosty and too much on the corpse-y side of purple for me, and I just can’t pull them off. If you have a serious edge to your look, you can probably go there better than I can.

Your friendly neighborhood beauty addict,

Karen