Estee Lauder has some velvety eye shadow. Their MINK is the darkest brown ever and no frost, pure pigment for making a crease appear where there is lacking...... Gold Nugget is the goldest shadow-ever! They make good mascara. I never liked Clinique. Their makeup looked....dull.....they should have just concentrated on skin care-they do that really, really well. Liz Arden makes great bronzer and bronze colors like eyeshadow and lip gloss. Lovely colors, lovely lipsticks too. They don't sell the line in Hawaii. When I was in the Mainland, I was Eliz. Arden CRAZY! Lancome I liked in the 90's....they had a bigger selection of colors and especially quads then. They had some really hip lipsticks. They did a vamp shade even before Chanel...called Violine I believe. Now they are...mediocre.Lauder-back on the subject-has pretty lipsticks like MAC, but like MAC, they fall right out of the bullet after a couple uses.....They do make nice foundation colors for women who are not pink or ashy.
I don't like the Clinique uniforms. They look like lab techs. Like they had a week long course in phlebotomy (drawing blood) and are very, very serious about their job. Lighten up!!! I also never saw a male Clinique attendant. Today I buzzed passed Macy's on the way to my bus and both MAC MUA were men. There was a young lady from Clinique in her lab jacket, no one at Chanel or Shiseido or Benefit. (Macy's is a one floor, teeny store in Waikiki!)
Lancome had no attendants either. Macy's always has MAC well staffed . The other lines often have a floater-according to someone who helped me purchase an Estee Lauder haul last month.I was only left with the impression, looking at their website a few years back, that they were expecting Thom Ford to do a miracle-but he went on to his own named line of fragrances after introducing Youth Dew Amber (delicious) and a couple lipsticks, and a bronzer in a shmaltzy compact.
The thing is...many of the Lauder lines appeal to women who wear less makeup and use more skin care, so the lines are skewed that way except for MAC which is bombarded with teenagers who don;t have lines ands bags and sagging-they just want a fast food oriented, hip , trendy makeup and really, who could blame them.....
At my age, I am really not a label whore, I am looking for things that work (I am a scientist and an artist by profession). I am gonna shop around.