I am so glad that so many of us have all gone off the deep end together with this collection! It makes me feel much better about dropping.......an entire paycheck (or two!) on all my new gems. I just re-swatched as many different versions as possible of a few of the colors that people seem to be hemming and hawing over: Clarity, Unsurpassable and Jade's Fortune to see how different or similar they are to each other. And I know that it TOTALLY depends of the veining in each one but my scientific testing has deduced the following (LOL):
CLARITY: he best looking in the pan, upon first swatch in the store I thought it looked too glittery and too grey, and too similar (but not as pretty as) Jade's Fortune. NOW I think it is awesome! The glitter is actually more like "sparkle" and to me there is totally a difference. The sparkle is more of a transparent relflects teal and not a harsh metallic glitter, and when clarity is all mixed with it's darks and blacks the teal reflection really comes out, especially beautiful when worn over a brown base. I think all of them have a good amount of white/pink/gold as well so it is a good one for an overall lid look all the way from light to dark. It IS similar to JF but if you are a makeup junkie (and you are) I would say the two are definitely different enough to own both. The are kind of like the "Day" and "Night" versions of each other.
UNSURPASSABLE: Freaking gorgeous! But mine has a LOT of Darker teal and Purple right in the center so I can pull a lot of violet out of mine, and it also has some great lime green and white areas around the edges so I can really separate the colors if I want to (and I do!). Mine barely has any copper glitter veining (thank goodness!) so I don't have to worry so much about the lack of cohesion between the base green color and topical sparkle as I originally feared. If you are going to go for this shadow and have a choice of veining I would say to make sure that there are clear areas of lime/white (you can only see the white if you look closely, but it will really help brighten any greens that are in there), as much purple as possible, and as little copper glitter as you can muster.
JADE'S FORTUNE: THIS IS THE BEST ONE OF ALL OF THEM!!!! In fact it is my fave from the whole collection. Mine has VERY distinct color sections that are really easy to use separately, so I may be biased.......But the great thing about this shadow is that I can take it from iridescent pink glowy highlight, to bright chartreuse, to dark blue sheen, over to taupe, and then onto teal and all the way into shimmery charcoal...ALL IN ONE SHADOW! I absolutely recommend choosing this shadow in person to get the best range of colors. Its not really about the amount of any one color to me, it is more about how much space is between each one, but even if you get a tightly swirled one the overall mixture of colors and textures on this one is to DIE for, and there seems to be very little glitter.
So....the overview: Of the 3 JF is the best, and in my opinion has the far superior texture of being shimmery and glowy, with very little "sparkle" or glitter. However, Clarity is really nice as well and in the same Charcoal/taupe with presence of teal family, but if you want "sheen" and not glimma glamma I would make sure you swatch in person (in daylight! MAC lighting always makes everything look wayyyyy sparklier than in real life). Unsurpassable is incredibly unique, so even though I am not losing my cool over it in this review, if you like greens and teals, or just really unique shadows with a cool chartreusey glow then you should nab this now. You won't ever see another shadow like this one.
OH my heavens that was long! And I haven't even started with my other MES "experiments"!
I Just figured that a lot of the other shadows are more self explanatory, and easy to suss out from swatches and pics, etc. Obviously Golden Gaze and Smoked Ruby are the best things since sliced bread, but you can see that from everyone else's swatches (even Temptalia's scathing reviews! OUCH She HATES this collection! LOL).
If anyone has any questions about any of these MES (or MSFs...brushes....etc) I am all about them at the moment and would be more than happy to give my 2 cents. Obviously!
