Hard Candy has recently put out some fun highlighters, and I was definitely game to try! I’m up for anything that has a bit more of a colourful tint… and even moreso when it has fun embossing on the pan! (What can I say, I’m a sucker for packaging.)

The Just Glow Highlighters are a 3 in 1 powder highlighter that claim to have a creamy, silky formula that will blend smoothly onto the skin. They retail for about $6-7 USD/CAD and easily found at Walmart stores in North America.

The shade I was the most excited to try was Fairy Dust – a pink, blue purple combination that looks absolutely freaking stunning in the pan.

Swatched out I was really impressed with how strong the pigment is on the individual shades – I wasn’t expecting that at all! And while you could use each shade individually, I think we can all acknowledge that most of us are going to be swirling our brushes in the whole pan, so we’ll more than likely end up with the shade on the far right – a soft, silvery lavender.

On the cheeks the pigment is surprisingly intense. The lavender-silver comes across *very* strongly. While I found the product a bit dusty in the pan (you get a lot of kick up), I was impressed with how softly it applies to the cheeks. It does deposit a lot of colour and you will need to either tap off your brush and/or buff the extra product into your face a bit more, but the overall effect is quite pretty!

The other Just Glow Highlighter I tried was 24K Gold. There’s a small sliver of white, but the predominant colour scheme is more gold/copper.

The colours are even stronger than the Fairy Dust highlighter, but there’s a lot more flakes and chunks in this shade, and I think most of that is coming from the gold in the center. The gold has all of the the sparkle/shimmer bits and they were definitely quite dusty. Swirled together they make a soft bronze-copper, although you can still see some definite gold chunks that stick out.

Fundamentally, the 24K Gold highlighter will work on me, but it definitely deepens up the outer edges of my cheekbones and changes the colour of my blush quite a bit. And that’s simply because I’m of a light skintone and the reflective quality of the product is not quite as strong as Fairy Dust is on me. I can get away with this highlighter, but it’s not something I’d find myself gravitating towards because a) the colour isn’t *quite* right, and b) I’m not a huge fun of the chunkier particles in this formula.

Final Thoughts

The Hard Candy Glow Up Highlighters were a bit of a mixed bag for me. Fairy Dust was definitely my favourite due to texture and colour, whereas 24K Gold was on the darker, more dustier side for me. That being said, although I liked Fairy Dust, I have to say that the texture of it doesn’t come anywhere close to their (now discontinued) Tiki Bronzer (which was basically a highlighter). The texture and colour on Tiki was phenomenal and I’m surprised that Hard Candy has recently discontinued it in favour of a product that doesn’t deliver the same kind of quality. While I think the packaging and the colours of the Glow Up Highlighters are fun, it’s really left me longing for more from their baked range.

The products featured in this post were sent to me for consideration. Post contains affiliate links.