If you’re looking to up your glow for the coming warmer months (if you’re in the northern hemisphere, that is!), then you may want to take a peek at Mary Kay‘s new Illuminating Drops.

The Illuminating Drops come in three different shades (Silver Sands, Golden Horizon and Bronze Light) and contain 15 mls of product – which is a TON! The average foundation bottle  has 30 mls of product, so you’re getting half of a full foundation!

The application method for the Illuminating Drops is, as you would expect with the name, dropper-style. I’m used to facial oils being in dropper-style bottles which are far less viscous than these drops, so I found it was best to push down the nozzle when you have the whole cap off the product, insert it into the bottle and then release it so that the tube can fill up. If you push the nozzle down and then release when you have the cap on, it just forces air into the bottle and you won’t actually collect any product when you release the button.

That being said, you don’t need the tube to scoop up much product for using on your face, because a little goes a very long way with the Illuminating Drops. There are three shades which (with my lack of MUA knowledge) will be able to suit the majority of skin tones.

• Silver Sands: a pearlescent pink with a soft silver cast.
• Golden Horizon: slightly golden, but not that strong in colour on my skin. Every time I look at this shade, the first thing that comes to mind is BECCA’s Champagne Pop.
• Bronze Light: the one shade that won’t really work on my skin tone because of the depth. This is a gorgeous deep bronze with golden highlights.

Silver Sands has a lovely soft pink hue that tends to come across quite silvery. I opted to pair this with cooler toned eyeshadow looks as I felt it worked best with them. It can appear quite pale at times, so I think this would work best for fair to very light skintones.

Golden Horizon initially surprised me as I thought it would be too dark for my skintone. When you blend it out it loses a lot of the pigment that’s inherent in my swatch shot above. It still maintains a golden hue, but I found it more wearable that Silver Sands just because of how it paled down.

I found these both applied best when I dropped a little bit of product onto the back of my hand, tapped it out with my finger to disperse it a bit, and then tapped it on to the tops of my cheekbones with my finger tip. A brush seemed to disturb my makeup underneath, so I definitely prefer to use my finger. I’m not generally one for finger application, but this seemed to work just fine and it blended out incredibly easily without much fuss.

Final Thoughts

These are beautiful! The Mary Kay Illuminating Drops are an easy no muss, no fuss highlighter to wear during the warmer months (or any time really) when you want that lit from within glow… but with a little bit of an extra boost of shine. It’s a healthy glow – the kind that reminds me of a beach-y face that’s been wearing sunscreen for a while and has a hint of gleam from that product. Golden Horizon was definitely my favourite of the two I tried (I didn’t try Bronze Light because it’s too deep and I just wouldn’t wear it even as a bronzer to be honest).

The products featured in this post were sent to me for consideration.