Glow and Tell — New NARS Cosmetics Banc de Sable Highlighting Palette

There’s a unique mystique to a banc de sable or sandbank, how its surface rises above a body of water, how it seems to play peek-a-boo and only emerge to reveal itself when the tide is low. If you look at photos of the Maldives, you’ll marvel at the images of sandbanks — some resembling winding trails amid crystalline blue seas, others tiny patches of land shaped like rounded saucers, like perfect arepas, their white sand surfaces shimmering under the sun’s rays. These oceanographical treasures inspired the new NARS Banc de Sable Highlighting Palette ($49 at Sephora.com), a trio of opalescent shades that capture the sensual allure of bare sun-kissed shoulders and legs, the inviting warmth of tropical sandy expanses.

Aside from the beautiful golden tones and opalescent finish of each radiant color, the NARS Banc de Sable Highlighting Palette is unique in that the highlighters it contains are water-activated and thereby truly burgeon when applied to the skin, reacting with the moisture on the skin’s surface to yield a more believable glow. Moreover, the shades can be brushed onto the face dry for an iridescent sheen or wet for a deeper, more metallic finish. The fact that water played a key factor in formulating the highlighter shades further underlines the banc de sable inspiration — after all, the perimeters of a sandbank are always submerged under water, and yet they still appear resplendent under the shallow water.

This stunning palette, then, contains three shades that will make your complexion glow majestically: Rivage, a glistening pearl hue with a slight golden tint that reminds me of white sand beaches; Salé, an incandescent peach champagne hue with golden shimmer; and Embruns, a rose gold tone with a metallic finish. Below, you’ll find swatches of all three hues:

Next, check out some photos in which I’m wearing the Rivage  shade on my cheekbones. I actually applied the highlighter to accentuate my cheekbones during a TV appearance, and I was blown away by how much they popped on screen — particularly because it didn’t necessarily look like I had spent hours sculpting my face and, instead, the glow-y effect seemed natural, as if my skin just emanated that sort of dewiness (and in all the right places, no less!).

As you can see, when you blend the color onto the skin, it doesn’t look like a chalky white shade but, rather, it develops this believable opalescence.

I adore all three of the highlighter shades, and I vary which one I use depending on my destination, the occasion, and my outfit. For the above look, I chose the Rivage shade given that I was wearing a lot of silver and that my outfit incorporated pastel shades that I felt would be nicely complemented by that pearly supernatural glow. For days when I want more of a sun-kissed look, I go straight to the Salé shade, which looks amazing on bare skin as well as atop foundation. And when I want a glow that could rival J.Lo’s in the “Waiting for Tonight” video, I zoom in on the Embruns shade.  Other times I layer and blend them together to customize my glow.

Time to glow on, girls!