Right before The Christmas, there was an exciting launch of the Clarins Spring/Summer 2012 collection. One never needs much of an excuse to go hang in a fancy hotel in Temple Bar, and beautiful cosmetics notwithstanding, the nibbles were pretty impressive.

I haven’t had a chance to play with the Ombre Minerale 4 Couleurs and in all honesty, that bright turquoise pigment gives me the willies — but I am your intrepid beauty blogger, and will give it a go in due course.

But! I didn’t expect to like the Gloss Prodige in Papaya. Not so much the gloss part, but the papaya part. It looks really coral-ly in real life, and I am not a fan of coral, and it is not a fan of me. I wanted to see how prodigious the gloss was, though, and I can say that it is so prodigious that the papaya colour actually worked. The glossiness of this is extreme, and very sexy.

As vernal as I’d like to be right about now, when we are bracing ourselves for some below zero temps, I don’t think I can pull off the sky-blue vibe of that shadow, not in December/January. I’ll leave that for braver souls than I.