MAC Snow Ball: Opalescent Face Powder in Happy Go Dazzlingly and Here Comes Joy

Today, MAC launched the first part of their annual holiday collection called Snow Ball: "Find your rhythm and light up the night in cool frost and high-chrome shine. We've got all the bling you'll ever need to make everyone go star-struck. Be the sleighbelle of the ball, dancing until morning, feeling alive, reveling in the new generation. See you on the dance floor." Each year, MAC releases a colour collection of individual items for a single colour story along with a slew of value sets. 

The Snow Ball colour collection sees the launch of 16 new and limited edition products, including two shades of Opalescent Face Powder, which is described as "a powder that transforms cheeks into pearly orbs that light up the night. Adds the perfect high-impact shimmering glow to skin." They are housed in "cool crushed champagne metallic" mirrored compacts with clear plastic boxes featuring a gold geometric snowflake design. The powder itself is embossed with a snowflake design. Each Opalescent Face Powder contains a total of 10 grams of product, and retails for $38. 
Happy Go Dazzlingly and Here Comes Joy
In daylight: Happy Go Dazzlingly and Here Comes Joy
In direct light: Happy Go Dazzlingly and Here Comes Joy

Happy Go Dazzlingly is a light-medium warm golden champagne in a shimmery opalescent finish. This is a new and limited edition shade. It has a soft, finely-milled texture, and goes on smoothly and evenly. It has high pigmentation and opaque colour pay-off. It can be layered and blended out easily. It is more yellow and more muted than Oh, Darling!, darker and more yellow than Double-Gleam, and lighter and more yellow than Global Glow.

Here Comes Joy is a medium warm gilded peach in a shimmery opalescent finish. This is a new and limited edition shade. It has a soft, finely-milled texture, and goes on smoothly and evenly. It has high pigmentation and opaque colour pay-off. It can be layered and blended out easily. It is darker and more peach than Beaming Blush, more peach than Global Glow, and warmer and more peach than Superb.

Snow Ball might just be my favourite MAC holiday collection to date. They killed it with the packaging, colours, wearability, and textures this year. The Opalescent Face Powders offer a smoother illumination than Mineralize Skinfinish and are less metallic than Extra Dimension Skinfinish (which will be launching in holiday face kits on November 2), but what sets this formula apart is actually the texture. For those who don't like that weightless, baked texture of MSF or EDSF, the Opalescent Face Powders have that soft, finely-milled texture of Anastasia Beverly Hills' Glow Kits or Becca's Shimmering Skin Perfectors. Both shades are pigmented with full colour pay-off, apply smoothly and evenly, and blend out beautifully. As highlighters, Happy Go Dazzlingly will suit light-medium to dark skintones, and Here Comes Joy will suit medium to deep-dark skintones, but both shades here are definitely geared towards warmer undertones. On that note, these are surprisingly unique compared to the highlighters in MAC's permanent range in both colour and texture, so they are definitely worth checking out if you're looking for a new pretty highlighter for this holiday season (they have snowflakes on them!) or you're just a highlighter fiend like me.