Sleek Makeup is a UK drugstore cosmetics brand that, while available to purchase online with international shipping, has not yet arrived in stores in Canada. I've been intrigued by the brand for a while, so when I saw the opportunity to buy some of their products in person at IMATS last November, I selected the Blush By 3 palette in Pumpkin and two single powder blushes. Sleek's blushes are are meant to be "long-lasting and highly pigmented" and "glide on smoothly and enable you to create an array of stunning looks." Each blush is packaged in a slim rectangular black mirrored compact, comes with a total of 8 grams of product, and retails for $6.99 USD.
Flamingo is a medium-dark cool-toned fuchsia pink in a satin-matte finish. It has a soft, silky texture, and goes on smoothly and evenly. It has high pigmentation and opaque colour pay-off. It can be layered and blended out easily. It is cooler than MAC Rhubarb (PRO), similar though more matte than MAC Azalea (PRO), subtle though more matte than Tom Ford Narcissist, darker and more fuchsia than NARS Desire, brighter and cooler than Clinique Berry Pop, and darker and brighter than NYX Pinky.
Life's a Peach is a medium warm peach-orange in a matte finish. It has a soft, silky texture, and goes on smoothly and evenly. It has high pigmentation and opaque colour pay-off. It can be layered and blended out easily. It is brighter and more orange than MAC Peaches, lighter and less reddened than MAC Modern Mandarin, brighter than NARS Gina, lighter and more orange than Tarte Tipsy, brighter and more orange than Tarte Blissful, and warmer and less yellow than NYX Cinnamon.
Like with the Pumpkin blush palette, I am incredibly impressed with these single blushes. Both shades are super-smooth and finely-milled, producing even application with full colour pay-off that is easy to layer and easy to blend out. They are richly pigmented and you can get true-to-pan colour effortlessly, but they're soft and silky so that they're not hard or daunting to use. The vibrancy and depth of the shades work extremely well on dark skintones, but they also blend out well to leave just a soft flush of colour, which bodes well for those who are fairer and don't want to rock the clown-cheek look. They perform like much higher end brands like MAC, NARS, Tarte, and even Tom Ford, but at a significantly lower cost. Now, of course, we buy prestige brands for the whole package: the product, the formula, the colours, and the case. They make us feel classier and more luxe, which is why we splurge on them. But if you're on a budget and looking for a good, inexpensive, but prestige-quality blush, Sleek is definitely worth checking out. It's really a damn shame that Sleek isn't available in stores here, because I really, truly believe that they can out-perform a lot of other drugstore or "high street" brands. But for now, we can order online for a reasonable shipping cost.
