Stila Prime Pot

After neglecting eye primers for years they've made a comeback, and with a vengeance as I've been obsessed with them this past year! I have very oily lids, and I'm on the hunt for a drier eye primer for use under liquid, cream, gel, damp eye shadows in general. May be that's silly of me, since many liquid, cream, gel eye shadows themselves can be used as a base and primer. It does give me excuses to try out new primers though ^.^

One of the more promising ones is this Stila Prime Pot. I picked up the color Caramel during the Stila warehouse sale last fall out of curiosity, and it turns out to be the winning dry texture I've been looking for! That said, it's far from perfect. First off, the color Caramel is just wrong on my lids, but I'll start with the good stuff first ^.^

All pictures taken in natural light without flash.

This eye primer feels like a dried up foundation cake! I mean, it's dry, and not just because it's prone to drying out, thanks to the poor packaging which I'll get to next. But that's exactly the texture I've been searching high and low for! The vast majority of the eye primers I've used range from creamy to very runny and wet, like the T'estimo Eye Bright Up Base which I still(!) use and love under powder eye shadows. But because they're moist, they're no good with equally moist eye shadows. So for those I need something much drier to hold up against my oily lids.

Anyway, in addition to the dry texture, this Stila eye primer is thick and provides good coverage, evening out my lids ready them for subsequent colors. It dries fast, because well, it's dry to begin with, so I dab it on as quick as I can because it's impossible to blend out after it sets. Since the color Caramel doesn't work with my skin tone, I went ahead and bought a different color, Taffy. I will review that one soon.

Aside from buying the wrong color, the only other thing I don't like about this primer is its packaging. It comes in a glass pot with screw cap. The glass pot is nice, but the screw cap is not. Because it doesn't seal very well at all. You'll see in the pictures below that primer itself has already started to dry out even more so than it's already dry!


- Caramel: I love the texture of this primer, but I hate this color. Not only it's too dark, it's too yellow for my skin tone. I tried to use it a few times with a cream eye shadow that would counter the yellowness of this primer but just couldn't get it to work. So it has now found a loving home with my friend A. who has a more tanned complexion than mine. And what do you know, it matches her skin tone almost exactly!