Review & Swatches: Tarte Fantastic Foursome 4-Piece Amazonian Clay 12-Hour Blush Enthusiast Set

Availability: Sephora, Tarte
Price: $35.00

As part of Tarte’s Holiday 2012 Collection, the company is releasing a set of new, limited-edition Amazonian Clay 12-Hour Blush colors. These blushes come in one gift-ready set.

• Angelic: shimmering champagne
• Fantastic: soft fuchsia
• Magic: pink coral
• Stellar: shimmering nude

Packaging: 8.75/10

These blushes come in the same packaging as Tarte’s regular Amazonian Clay blushes, except that they are smaller and do not contain mirrors inside. The four (4) blushes come neatly packaged in a gift-ready box.

Quality: 6.5/10

I am a big fan of Tarte’s Amazonian Clay blushes. I think I own every permanent shade. Unfortunately, the colors you get in this gift set are not of the same caliber as Tarte’s regular-line blushes.

Fantastic, Magic, and Stellar are so sheer. The swatches of the colors individually, below, show the powders layered three (3) to four (4) times. And yet they still barely show up on the skin–especially Stellar. I’m all for natural-looking blushes and I personally prefer more toned-down looks. But if it take several layers to get a color to show up, I consider that weak pigmentation, not “natural” color.

The formula is also lacking. The powders are chalky and don’t seem to want to adhere to the skin, which makes the weak pigmentation even worse. Even after you’ve worked to get the color to show up on your cheeks, your efforts are short-lived because the color fades after a few hours.

The only shade I can give praise to is Angelic, which is a lovely highlighting shade whose colorless quality makes it suitable for pairing with any shade of blush.

Ease of Use: 7/10

These powders take several layers (think between three (3) and five (5)) to get the colors to show up.

Price: 9.5/10

For $35.00 you get four (4) mini-blushes for a total of 0.4 ounces (12.12 grams) of product. One regular-sized blush costs $25.00 and contains 0.2 ounces. This is a good deal–you get much more product per dollar with this gift set.

Update: After writing my review, I took a look at some other customer reviews of this set. I was very surprised to see so many people say that these are highly pigmented. Unfortunately, this was not at all my experience with these blushes.