Review: Maybelline Eyestudio Cream Eyeshadow Trio in Pedal to the Metal

When I was chatting with the lovely ShakeupYourMakeup on Twitter the other day, I told her that I don't generally get along well with cream eyeshadows. She asked me if I had purchased one of these new Maybelline trios yet, and I told her I was scared of them because, well, I have super oily lids. But then a deal came around that I couldn't resist (I had a CVS coupon that I could pair with a manufacturer's coupon) so instead of $6.99, I ended up paying just $3.99 for this:

Maybelline EYESTUDIO Cream Eyeshadow Trio in Pedal to the Metal (retail: $6.99 at CVS)

I love silvers and I love bronzes, so it was a no-brainer that I was going to purchase Pedal to the Metal. And when I swatched the shades (above) I was very pleasantly surprised to see how pigmented these creams are--much more than I was anticipating.

However, I'm afraid that this is where my love affair with this trio ends. In the days following this purchase, I've tried wearing these colors alone, with primer, and also with powder eyeshadow layered over them. I've tried applying them with my fingers and also with a few different brushes (tip: they apply so much easier with fingers--with a brush I've found that the pigmentation is weak and they apply much more sheer than when I apply them with my finger). Each time I wear them, no matter what I do, they crease like crazy. 

I'm now going to show you some VERY scary pics taken five hours after application. Unfortunately, I forgot to take "Before" pics of this look, so let me tell you that I used the silver shade on my lid and crease, and I also used a little it of the yellow shade on my browbone.

I also decided to use my Cover Girl Liquiline Blast eyeliner in Silver Spark on this particular day, thinking that since this liner wears so well (and for so long) it would be interesting to see if the Maybelline cream shadow would affect the staying power of the liner. 

Again, brace yourselves because this is not pretty:

These pics were taken after wearing these cream shadows for five hours. The weather that day was in the low 80s, and I did a lot of running around in my car and also playing with my 3-yr-old niece (playtime included blowing bubbles outside, making a fort out of chairs and bedsheets, things like that). Admittedly, my brows are a hot mess in these pics, but I literally did not want to touch my eyes at all before taking these pics, so that you could see exactly what I saw when I looked in the mirror.

As you can see, my lids pretty much devoured these shadows. The creasing is bad, and my long-wearing Liquiline eyeliner has been completely destroyed as well.  Looking closely, you can also see that there is a considerable amount of transfer from my upper lid down to my lower lid, where this cream shadow literally melted and ran down to underneath my eyes.

I do want to state, for the record, that I did not wear a primer in these pics, but I also can confirm that, with a primer, these shadows didn't perform much better for me. And when I layered a powder shadow over these cream shadows, it actually made my powder shadows crease.

In fairness, I have not tried the combination of primer, cream shadow, and then powder shadow. Perhaps this is the winning combo to stop these shadows from disappearing or creasing, but as far as I'm concerned, they're just not worth that type of effort (for me, at least).

If you have oily lids and you want to wear a shadow that's going to stay put during warm-weather months, I wouldn't suggest Maybelline Eyestudio Cream Eyeshadow Trios. But if you don't have oily lids, this product  might perform a lot better than it did for me.  Again, this is just my experience, but I really can't recommend this one to my fellow oily-skinned gals.

Do you own one of these trios? How do you like them? I'd love to hear from you.