 I have a very, very exciting review today. You obviously know what it is by the title, so I don't know why I'm playing coy, but the Melt Cosmetics Gemini 2 came in the mail for me today, and y'all know. Maybe you don't if you're new. When it comes to Melt Cosmetics, I feel like they are hit or miss. They have come out with some of my favorite palettes, but they also have come out with some of my least favorite palettes that literally evoke anger in me because they are so expensive. The last Melt palette that I tried, I really enjoyed. It was the Amore Imati Posas Collection. Hopefully this one is good. I've also been loving Brunette. I think they might have turned it around. Am I being too positive? We will find out. So this actually was a pretty exciting launch because Melt Cosmetics restocked their Gemini palette as well. This is one of Melt's most coveted palettes. It's one of the most beautiful, unique color stories. It was really a first for its time. Since it did launch a couple years ago, it does have new packaging now and it has embossments, which you will see that are similar to the Gemini II. But apparently it's the same formula, but how beautiful is the Gemini I palette, right? What a dream. So if you've been wanting it, now is the time to get it. They do offer a bundle for $100. Each palette is $58. You can get both the Gemini I one and two for $100. Save a little bit of coin on the Melt Cosmetics website. The Gemini II palette though also just launched on Sephora. So if you want that Sephora discount, then you should also order it now before the sale if you're interested. So let's get into it. I ordered this off of the Melt Cosmetics website, did not get the bundle because I already have the old Gemini palette. Came very well packaged, pretty happy with shipping. I used a code to get 20% off, so I'm not mad about that. I would suggest though, if you are a rouge at Sephora to order the Gemini II palette off of Sephora, just because you know returns, I find it to be easier if you have a Sephora near you. Here is what the outer carton is going to look like. There's a lot of detail to it. It's very, very beautiful. I didn't get that. Could you try again? I wasn't talking to you Siri. Okay. She'll always be listening. This palette is made in the USA and it has a 12 month shelf life. If you do need to take a look at the back, feel free to pause and I don't know, look at it. But this is the outer carton, very plain. I like it. And then here is the actual palette itself. It is so beautiful, all of the roses. When you turn it towards the back, this is what it looks like. Okay. And now let's get to the inside. So it will come with a plastic cover, a long mirror as all the palettes do. And then here are the shades. So you'll see the rose embossments on here. The Gemini palette now has these rose embossments. It's not going to be plain like the one that I have, but they look so beautiful. Okay. It's another rose palette. I know, I know enough. This is like the third, fourth rose palette that has entered my collection recently. These are the saving grace right here. And here I can see the continuation from the Gemini One Palette. So this is supposed to have rich, sultry tones that you can blend impeccably with deep wines and moss tones. You never know what side you're going to get. She's soft and edgy at the same time, according to their website. I would say my initial reaction to the color story because I haven't told you guys yet. I wasn't jumping for joy on this. I mean, the Gemini One Palette, the OG, like this is, this is a look, it's unique, it's daring. Maybe not so much now, but when it came out, it certainly was. This is safe and Melt Cosmetics is usually not about safe. So we'll see. I don't love it, but I think it's a practical functional palette. So let's get to swatching. I can see it right here. I'm actually going to turn the lights down a couple of notches in case you want to get a better look at the colors. So the majority of this palette is going to be matte. Looks like we have two shimmers here. Definitely a matte heavy palette. Let's get to swatching. So we have Bella, Ladylike, and Sweetheart. They feel really great. Not too powdery. So far, so good. Okay, let's go into it. Love sick shmood. Ooh, this feels really beautiful. Sometimes the Melt Cosmetics shimmers are questionable. That one felt nice. Okay, let's see. Let's try this shimmer. Okay, I think this one is good. It's really, really deep though. So this one would definitely need to be for like a smoky eye. Now we're really into the deeper grungy tones. LX Queen. Ooh, let's see how this one is. Matteo, Matteo. Boy, mom. This right here. Right? Look at that. How stunning. That one is a little patchy. Nice. The shimmers here are very deep, which is very different than what most palettes will do. Very different from what I'm used to as well. Think we'll do two looks today. Then last one is Almond Eyes. So I think everything swatched pretty good. This shade is questionable, so we'll use that on the eye. Very heavy in the red tones, I will say. I would have liked maybe a really light green or a gold shade, green gold, something like that. Just to bring some brightness into this palette, I think it would really make it easier to complete a look. Just to highlight it, I think that's what we need here. But let's get into it. It's definitely more grungy than I thought. I thought it was gonna be like a safe wearable palette, but it's quite grungy. And I've decided that I'll hold it up here while I talk so you can look at the shades. I've decided we're gonna do two looks with this. Probably something working more with the greens and something more working with the reds, because sometimes those shades, they can clash and it won't be very good. For my base, start off with this eye first. I'm going to use my Benefit Boing Kickless Concealer. I do not have any concealer underneath my eyes just in case we do get some fallout. So I am prepared for that because Melt sometimes, she has some fallout. I wanna see if these two are going to be redundant to one another. So we're gonna start off with Bella because they look close. I do have some kickback. So I am going to wipe off my brush. I'm gonna circle this on the inner half of the eye, focusing mostly in the crease, but it's okay if it gets on the eyelid. Very nice. I don't think you can go wrong with this shade unless it's so overly powdery, it disappears. But very nice. This is a Wingust number 16 brush, by the way. Okay, let's see if Ladylike is different enough to justify having two of these shades here. I would say so. Yes, awesome. Sometimes, you know, these brands we put in colors that look the same and it's just a waste of a pan, you know, a waste of a color. These two are very different. I think Ladylike definitely is gonna carry more depth and more orange, if you guys can see that as well. Beautiful, blended really great. Sweethearts, I have to test this one as well. I'm just making sure because those three first three shades, they all are kind of in the same depth level. So I'm thinking was it really necessary to have all three shades if they're kind of within that same depth level, especially since even though the undertones are different, the general tones are the same, peachy roses. So this one definitely added a little bit more rose. So, okay, they are standing out. I am not mad about that. I still wish there was like something brighter in here as opposed to three of those with the same tone. And if you don't know, I'm a very picky girl. Being out loud as I go, that doesn't mean it's bad, okay, let's try the fourth one. As you can see, I'm not being very adventurous here. But I just need to test. That does add depth. I don't know, I feel like we could have added something more interesting. This is literally four shades. And when I add the fifth, it's almost too monochromatic for me. I can't believe I'm saying that, but it's almost a little boring. Like we could have done more shimmers instead of all four of these, but they're blending good. Okay, I might be talking my trash, but the quality is good. And that's the most important part. What's not my style might be yours. Love sick, let's see. This one is more red, it can turn out bad very easily. Okay, that is adding the depth. The shade we put before it, a little unnecessary in the palette now that we have this. This is a Wingoss number 20 brush, by the way, fabulous for small hooded eyes. And I'm just making this look quite smoky. So I'm gonna carry this shade in. Gonna continue to use this brush. And we are going to go into this shade right here because this shade swatched weird. So let's see, gonna kinda run this closer to the lash line. It does add more depth, at least in the capacity that I am using it here, which is very small areas on my small eye. It is deepening and it is different. There's almost too many mattes in here though. I mean, I literally just put one, two, three, four, five, six mattes just to get this blend when you can really probably get it with like three mattes, maybe even two. Okay, now let's move into Shmood, which is the shimmer. Melt shimmers can be hit or miss. I think this one is a hit. This one is a nice solid shimmer. It's not too glimmery, it's not too dimensional, like a lot of the shimmers that I personally prefer. It's just like a solid, basic shimmer. It looks nice and it's applying really nice, even with a brush, which is a refer number two, by the way. I mean, this is a pretty nice, well-blended smoky eye. I think these shadows are blended beautifully on my eye. So the quality here, really, really nice, but it's a lot of rose tones for sure. I used all of these all the way down just to get a pretty simple look. If we could have done more variety or maybe expanded the greens a little bit up, just an opinion. Okay, get the lower lash line now. Use the reddish shade, Love Sick right here. I want the red to be quite strong in this look. Super vampy palette, wow. Much more vampy than I was expecting. Great if you love these grungy, vampy look. Gorgeous, oh my goodness, okay. I have to, have to, have to get it even darker. Then I'm gonna go back and just shmood the shimmer using a refer number three brush. And I just love the way that this will look all along the lash line as well. Okay, so this is the first look. I mean, I definitely played it safe because I wanted to see how individually each color looked if they were different enough. Let's do this eye now. So I'm just gonna play with the greeny fillers. And I feel like the green side of this palette is going to complement the Gemini palette, which I will do a side by side comparison for you at the end of this tutorial. Giving this a fair chance with how I would normally start this look, I'm gonna go straight into Ladylike with a refer, I don't know what this brush is. I have a prototype with a different name, but a big fluffy blending brush. And I'm gonna use this as our base transition color to kind of make blending a little bit more seamless, kind of have this peach shade peeking through a bit of warmth to the look. I think you can see where I'm going with the look. It's gonna be a deep smokey eye. I'm just gonna continue with the same brush and we're gonna go into Almond eyes. Even though this is a blending brush, I'm just gonna start off by patting it on the lid, like so, and then blending it in towards the crease. Not bad pigmentation wise, considering I'm using a blending brush to pat it down. Careful, make sure it doesn't end up looking too muddy. Gonna take a smaller winged ass number 19 brush, which I just cleaned off all the product on there. Sure, the edges are well blended. I'm gonna continue with the same brush. We're gonna go into Boy Mum. So this is a little deeper. It has a little bit more gray in it than Almond eyes. Going to carry this the outer half, make sure she's blendable. This is very important. Wow, both of these shades are quite dark. I'll blend it out. I just wiped off my refer number two brush and we're going into this shade right here. And I'm gonna put that pretty much all over the lid, leaving a little bit of space in the outer corner. We're gonna put that right on top. The reason I put the matte shade as a base down first is to really get a strong smokey eye. But again, with the shimmers in here, they're not extremely glimmery or reflective. It's just a very matte, heavy palette. You're not gonna get lowy or gleamy looks. You're gonna have to dig into other palettes for that. But the blend on this, really fabulous. I didn't even get that much fallout surprisingly. I was sure I would with these types of shades. And I'm just gonna do a very predictable mixture of these two on the lower lash line. So nothing you're gonna miss out on. And then some of the green shade. Okay, boom. I was able to use all the shades and then some. So let me finish the whole look, the whole vibe. And I will be back to give you my final thoughts and a comparison with the first palette. Here are the looks, very deep, vampy, grungy. So I just wanted to quickly compare the two palettes for you. By the way, the new packaging of the Gemini 2 feels heavier. A bit thicker. So I wanted to compare them just so you can kinda see. I think very clearly you can see the not green sides of the palettes aren't similar. And honestly, the Gemini 2 palette, which is the one at the bottom by the way, the greens are less obviously green. They're definitely more neutral. So I didn't do exact side-by-side swatches, but these are the green and the Gemini 2 palettes. And these are the greens in the Gemini palette. And they just look different. These are brighter. This shade right here, which is the last shade in the Gemini 2 palette, fits in just great with these three. They're kinda close. But other than that, there aren't any direct dupes. So if you are wondering if you have the Gemini 1 palette, does it make sense to get the Gemini 2? In terms of repeats, you're fine. You can pick it up. It's not gonna be an issue. They are quite different palettes, honestly. So that's up to you. So final thoughts. I think the quality of this palette is really great. So I'm excited about that. It's not really the palette for me though. It's a bit too deep and grungy. I would have liked a little bit more variety in depth there in the palette. And I just feel like we didn't need so many roses. I would have liked a little bit more variety and that. And you guys know I love really textured glimmery shimmers. So in terms of my personal preferences, this palette just didn't hit it. But if you enjoy the colors, you like this kind of deep, vampy look, the quality was very, very nice. The mattes especially blended really beautifully. You can see how well blended my makeup looks right now. And that's definitely attributed to the mattes in this palette. So I hope you guys enjoyed the video and found it helpful. Let me know, did you pick this palette up? How do you feel about it? And I will catch you guys in the next video. All right guys, have a good one.