Early this year when I was in Malaysia, I did a bout of shopping at the new Paradigm Mall in KL. One of the stores I went to was Sephora. Sephora prices in Malaysia aren’t equivalent to the prices in the US (they’re often more expensive) but hey, I was there and thought why not pick up a few things while I’m at it. Can you believe that I only bought 2 items in Sephora? How wrong does that sound? 😛 One of them was the Sephora Collection Sculpting Disk.

Now I’ve never been very good at contouring. Whilst I’m not a fan of severe contouring of the face to look very angular, I’d still love to practise more on creating better definition of my face. I have quite a large face (made worse by weight gain over the years) and I need to contour the cheeks and jawline to trick y’all in thinking my face doesn’t look that big in pictures compared to real life. 🙂

Since I like multitaskers, I thought it might be interesting to try the Sculpting Disk.

It’s a contouring palette consisting of three shades – a bronzer, face powder and highlighter. I thought the palette’s quite cute with the embossing of SUN for the bronzer, the Sephora logo for the powder and LIGHT for the highlighter. The shades are not super pigmented; the swatches you see in the picture is after 4 layers of powder.

SUN: Matte almost orange-ish brown
POWDER: Matte nude.
LIGHT: Shimmery pink-toned nude

The palette has quite a strong scent that is very powdery and artificial. It’s not my cup of tea. The face powder has the biggest portion and quite rightly because you don’t need much of the SUN and LIGHT parts on the face. Unfortunately, I find the face powder quite powdery and slightly gritty. It doesn’t feel very fine-milled and when you sweep a face brush over it, there’s a lot of fallout from the midsection. Having said that, when it goes on the face, it’s not cakey nor look powdery on the skin. It does have decent oil control especially on the T-zone.

I particularly like the SUN bronzer. I’m usually quite wary of bronzers, especially how they’d go on Asian skin. A lot of bronzers often look dirty on Asian skin and I try to stay away from bronzers or contouring powder in general. However, this one actually looks quite good. There’s no muddiness on the skin and because it goes on quite sheer, it’s buildable and prevents overdoing of contour lines on the cheeks. For contouring, I prefer matte powder instead of shimmery bronzer because it’s meant to create a shadow, not highlight the area.

As for the LIGHT highlighter, it’s not a bad one too. It’s also quite sheer, so you don’t have to worry about overloading your face with shimmer. Just gently sweep your highlighting brush (it can be an eyeshadow blending brush or small face brush depending on the areas you want to highlight) over the powder and then onto your skin. Don’t dig the brush in because you might pick up too much glitter.

It’s a convenient palette for traveling. The disk is big (almost the size of my hand!), but it’s not very thick so traveling with it wouldn’t be a problem. I’d have liked this palette a whole lot better if not for its strong, almost-cloying fragrance.

I can’t remember how much I got it for in Malaysia but it retails at US$24.00 from Sephora US. This is available at all Sephora stores and Sephora online.

What I like about it: Good multitasking product for face powder, bronzing, contouring and highlighting.

What I do not like about it: The face powder is a tad powdery with a lot of fallout on the palette; strong unpleasant fragrance

Have you tried this sculpting disk before? Any recommendations for a good matte bronzer? 🙂