Make-Up
Buy and sell make-up products in Panama.
Foundation bought online is easy to get wrong: a shade picked from a screen arrives a little too pink or too pale, and the bottle goes back out nearly full. Palettes, lipsticks, pencils and blush follow it, some still in their cellophane, some swatched once and put away, alongside sealed pieces from small shops that sell one lipstick at a time. Mascara and liquid liner are another matter and only make sense sealed. Whatever the piece, the questions are the same two: is it genuine, and how much of it is left.
Make-up matched to your skin and make-up chosen by eye:
the first kind, foundation, concealer and powder, has to disappear into a skin tone, so the wrong shade makes it unwearable however good the formula. The second kind, eyeshadow palettes, liners, brow pencils, lipstick and gloss, is picked for its colour and suits anyone who likes that colour, which is why it finds a new owner far more easily. Blush and bronzer sit in between: forgiving on shade, less so on depth. Brushes, sponges and eyelash curlers live in beauty tools, and nail colour has its own place in hand and nail care.
Undertone and finish on a foundation or concealer:
depth is the easy part to judge; undertone is what makes a foundation look wrong. Warm skin turns grey in a pink-based shade and cool skin goes orange in a yellow one, so test on the jaw rather than the back of the hand. Finish comes next. Matte holds on oily skin through a long day, while satin and dewy suit drier skin and turn shiny on oily. Coverage runs from a tinted base with sun protection, which sits with sunscreen and self-tanners, up to full-coverage liquids and sticks.
Drugstore lipsticks, pencils and the prestige palettes that get copied:
sealed lipsticks, eye pencils, glosses and small palettes from the big drugstore lines sell in Panama for about $4 to $8 a piece, often through small shops that sell by the unit and can tell you which shades they still have. Prestige palettes and foundations cost many times that, and they are what gets copied. A sealed prestige palette offered for drugstore money is a copy. The reverse does not hold: copies are often priced only a little under the genuine article so that nobody asks, so a fair price proves nothing. Once opened, any piece is worth far less than a sealed one, because nobody can know how it was kept.
Copies, opened palettes and the mascara worth leaving alone:
a genuine compact or palette has some weight in the hand; a copy tends to feel light and loose at the hinge. Look up the shade name and number in the brand’s own range, then swatch a pressed colour on your arm. Copies tend to go on chalky, refuse to blend or smell of crayon. In an opened palette, a dip worn into a favourite pan or two is honest wear, but a fuzzy or raised spot on any pan means the whole palette is finished. A lipstick shows its history in the shape of the bullet. Leave mascara and liquid liner alone unless the seal is intact, because the wand goes back into the tube after every application.
The foundation shade that did not suit you:
write it out in full, name and number, and say plainly why: too light, too pink, too yellow. Someone with the right skin is searching for exactly that shade, and your reason tells them whether it will work on them. Photograph the open palette or the bottle by a window with a swatch on your inner arm beside it, and show the dip in each pan or the level left in the bottle. Group opened lipsticks or pencils by colour family rather than listing them one by one. A buyer collecting a bundle in Tocumen will open every compact and twist up every lipstick before paying, so bring them wiped clean and in the order you listed them.