$300 Eyeshadow?! Is Luxury Makeup Worth All Your Pretty Pennies?

Sisley L'Orchidée Rose Highlighting Blush With White Lily, $145, sisley.com

"I have a problem with collecting extremely expensive blush/highlighter compacts and then never, ever using them. Feeling utterly destroyed by TIFF, this morning, I sluggishly fished the vaguely vagina-like, sparkly pretty palette out of my purse, silently cursing my colleague for assigning me this test-drive. Since I'm running on zero sleep, applying a cosmetic I never use and then reviewing it is the last thing I want to do. But then something magical happened: after popping the compact open, laying eyes again on that cheery powder gave me a surprising little tingle of energy.

I contentedly dabbed my finger over the whole thing, then pressed it onto my cheeks. I even brushed my pinky on the lower half of the lily to get at the gold highlighter and gleefully striped it down my nose and on my brow bones. The glow it gave me was subtle indeed, but there was something about this beautiful trinket, this tiny act of luxurious leisure that perked me up. The $145 blush may not be better, per se, than a drugstore one, but the placebo effect? It's worth every penny."—Briony Smith, senior editor, culture