I saw the Physicians Formula Diamond Metallic Liquid Eyeshadows on a display a while back and initially skipped over them because liquid eyeshadows are a pain to use. But there are only 4 shades and they are supposed to be somewhat multichrome so I decided to give them a try.
The multichrome effect is more obvious in the tube than it is on the eye but I still find them to have a good amount of dimension.
Color payoff is decent but it’s not very opaque in one swipe. I have to build them up to get something resembling what I see in the tube. I tried using a fluffy brush, a flat brush, and my finger to apply these. Applying a thin, blended-out layer first with my finger and then building the color up slowly with a flat concealer brush worked out best for me. Some of these blend out more easily than others but none of them blend as well as I’d like around the edges to be able to use them by themselves. In every look, I used some powder shadows along with them in the crease and as transition shades.
I have about a minute to blend them out before they fully dry. For all the looks I did below, I applied these first and then used powder shadows afterward. This resulted in some flaking where the brush would sweep over parts that had dried. This happened most with the shade Precious Purple. They look slightly dry/crinkly/texturizing on the lid but not terrible. It becomes more pronounced the thicker I layer these on.
These so far are not the worst liquid eyeshadows I’ve tried. I like Bronze Brilliance and Golden Emerald best out of the 4. Beam of Blue is the most patchy and hardest to blend out. It can be layered to make it look more even but it was the most difficult to use. If you’ve tried liquid eyeshadows in the past and haven’t like them, these aren’t going to be all that different in the way they apply and sit on the lid. I still think powder shadows are much easier to control.
Bronze Brilliance
Bronze Brilliance has a strong rosy purple sheen with a very subtle light green shift. The larger swatch above is what it mostly looks like on the eye even turning my head and looking at it from different angles. The green shift seen in the smaller swatch is very hard to see on the eye.
Precious Purple
Precious Purple isn’t super different from Bronze Brilliance. Both have lots of purple in them but this one is more blue toned. This one has a orangey-gold shift. I didn’t notice this at all on the eye when I used it on the lower lashine.
Beam of Blue
Beam of Blue has a deep brownish grey base with a strong blue sheen and a dark purple shift. Just as with the shade above, the larger swatch is more true to how this appears to me in real life and applied on the eyes. I see a hint of the deep purple on the outside edges of my lid but it is faint.
Golden Emerald
Golden Emerald has a blue-green base color and a strong golden sheen. On the eye this looks lighter than it does in this swatch and I didn’t notice the gold sheen shift to a deep green like it did in the smaller swatch.
Looks
For this look, I used Bronze Brilliance on the top lid and Precious Purple on the lower lashline and used some powder shadows in the crease/transition area for a smoother looking blend. These two shades kind of look similar in the tube so I wanted to wear them together to see how different they are. Bronze Brilliance has a lot of purple in it but it is warmer and slightly rosier than Precious Purple. I got some flaking from this on my top lid… like it peeled and flaked off in small patches and left behind bare lid. This only happened with this eye and this look. The other times I wore it, I did not have this problem. Maybe I did something wrong with the application here. During wear, I had some flaking and fallout but it wasn’t too bad. This hung on really well all day. It just started to crease after 10 hours with no primer.
Here I used Beam of Blue on the lid and two neutral brown powder shadows to help disguise the patchy blend in the crease. This was the hardest of the four shades to use. It went on way less evenly so I layered quite a bit to build it up. It ended up looking pretty textured on my lids.
On the center of the upper lid, I am wearing Golden Emerald along with some of the green shades in my Urban Decay Wild Greens Palette (links to my review). This one has a blueish tone to it with lots of gold sparkle. It went on more evenly and blended out more smoothly than Precious Purple. The last two slides show how this looks when I was midway through applying my eyeshadow. I tried to show it from the side so you could see how it sits on the lid. In general, these don’t lay evenly on the lid but this shade was one of the better ones.
And one last look to show Precious Purple applied as the main shade all over the lid. By the time I got to this fourth look, I felt I had a bit better of a grasp on how to apply these but ran into more of an issue with using powder shadows in the crease afterward. If you scroll through the photos, I have one that shows more clearly how these can flake off the lid if you touch them too much after they’ve dried down. Flaking seems to only happen during application. Once I’m wearing the product all day, it seems to hold on just fine without any further flaking or peeling and it resists creasing super well. I could maybe be more gentle with a brush to minimize this issue.