Review: Urban Decay Naked Basics Palette

Rather than have an entire post dedicated to the fact that I've been M.I.A for the best part of two months I decided to jump in with a big ol' review and have just a smidge of exposition as an introduction...

I am officially now a resident of LONDON! I'm at the University of Westminster and am a whole week into my BA Journalism. I've been a total whirlwind of emotion and activity recently and it's so good to finally sit down and just breathe. Right up until the moment I left my little East Midlands town I was working as an Assistant Manager at Coral. I was literally doing 40-45 hour weeks in a desperate attempt to save as much money as possible for university and whilst it has really helped me financially, pretty much everything else fell by the wayside. I hardly saw my boyfriend or my family and organising and packing was left until the last minute (much the aforementioned boyfriend's irritation.) Needless to say I all but abandoned my little corner of the internet and it's looking very sorry for itself at the minute. But! I have a ton of time to myself now so I shall be getting creative with my new frugal student lifestyle and start producing some fun content in the very near future.

But for now...

As a celebration of my new freedom and the beginning of what should be the best time of my life I decided to take a wander to the Debenhams on Oxford Street to see some Urban Decay products in real life, something I'd never been able to do before. In a total contradiction to my insistence that I wasn't going to be spending any money I ended up walking out with the truly lovely Naked Basics Palette. Shout-out to Rickie who served me at the Urban Decay counter as you were super sweet and helpful. Go you.

First things first, I do love the packaging and presentation of this palette. It's neat, sleek and a great size for just slinging in your bag for top-ups during the day. The design and colours are sophisticated, grown-up and seem ideal for a whole host of simple, neutral looks. 

I genuinely wanted to adore this. I mean I spent £20 on it! But I think I may have expected a bit too much. No matter how I tried, I just couldn't get the pigmentation I'd seen elsewhere in my swatches. I don't think the variation between colours is great enough and the fall out is substantial in the darker colours. 

The above is a single, dry swipe on clean, bare skin without primer. I found that the shades could be built up with two or three heavy swipes but that's not how I usually do my swatches and I wanted a fair representation of what I was actually getting. Don't get me wrong, this is by no means a bad product. The pigmentation is fair and I think with a really good primer I could get a much better colour pay-off. However, I personally feel that when it comes to £20 for six shades, I shouldn't need to buy a great primer just to get the shade in the pan. The fact that these are matte shades (bar Venus which has a light shimmer) was always going to mean that they were a little dryer but I still can't help but be a touch disappointed.

It's not all doom and gloom though, as I say, these can be built up to produce better pigmentation and they do work well on the lid. They blend easily and the shade range means that you can pretty much put anything together and it won't look ridiculous. They're ideal for a range of daytime looks and the deliciously dark Crave can smoke out any look for a gorgeous night transition (but do have some tissues/wipes on hand to deal with fall out!) These also wear extremely well, no creasing or migration and easily 8+ hours of wear so they're ideal for a busy working day.

Final Verdict: A compact, neutral palette that may require a bit more effort than expected. Great if you're looking specifically for more matte shadows, but by no means essential.

I would LOVE some advice about how to work with this palette and please let me know if I'm doing anything wrong! What did you think of the Basics? Do you agree that it may have been a touch over-hyped and therefore a touch disappointing like me?

Lauren

Review and Swatches: Technic Electric Beauty Ultra Violet Eyeshadow Palette

Another fantastic item that Fiona sent me when I won her giveaway was this palette. I haven't heard much about the brand Technic. To be honest all I knew about them was that they occasionally produced amazing dupes of nail varnishes (Carnival for OPI Rainbow Collection if you're wondering, which I also got!) and that they were generally super cheap! Always a massive plus for me.

The Ultra Violet Palette contains 12 shadows in purples, pinks, lilacs and mauves. At first glance it looks a lot like a Sleek palette. It comes with the same large mirror and the same size pans. It's housed in a slim, secure, black plastic container and comes with a generic double ended sponge applicator. I had no problems opening and closing it and I'd feel happy travelling with it.
I love the colours available here, I don't own many purples at all. There are a few dotted about in my other palettes but it's nice to have so many all in one place! I'm finding myself reaching for purple eye shadow more and more recently and I think it can be a nice alternative to neutrals without being too overtly bright or garish.

The pigmentation is so good and they were really smooth! (As always, no primer used.) They're all shimmer shades but I really don't mind that, I think shimmer eye shadows look fantastic. This is all literally just one quick swipe on my arm. The only ones that I had a small bit of trouble with were second colour on the first row and the first two colours on the second row. They're just a smidge chalkier than the others and therefore slightly patchy so they'd require a bit of building up. Still really beautiful colours though. I was getting a bit of a duochrome effect from a lot of the shadows, some of them shined silver or blue which was gorgeous! This is particularly evident in shade 11. It's a rich kind of pink/cranberry/mauve? Very unique and it shines a lilac/silver colour.

Here's a look I created with the palette for day time:

This is shade 4 all over the lid, shade 1 in the crease and under the eye and shade 12 as an inner corner and brow highlight. Liner is Rimmel's Exaggerate Liquid Liner in Black and mascara is The Body Shop's Super Volume Mascara in Black.
I think one of the great things about this palette is that you could literally pick any of the colours and they would go together well. I loved this look on me and I actually got creepily chatted up by three different weirdos in the middle of the day so I guess it's doing something? Weirdo-attracting isn't really a selling point but I did also get some compliments from normal people! I wore this for 8 hours and it didn't crease AT ALL. Not one bit. It faded a little by the 6 hour mark but I can live with that. I'm so impressed with these and can't wait to experiment some more with the colours!

And now time for the best bit: I've had a trawl around on the internet to find out where you could buy this and I found it here at Love Thy Make-Up for £1.99! Absolutely amazing. There's also free delivery on the website until midday tomorrow if you wanted to buy one of these for yourself. I don't need to tell you that it's worth it for £1.99!

Final Verdict: If you like purples and pinks, you should 100% try this!

What do you think to these shadows? Have you tried any other Technic products that you recommend?

Lauren

Swatches: MUA Immaculate Collection Palette

I was very lucky and won this from the lovely Misellyre (go check out her blog, it's one of my favourites) a few weeks ago but I've yet to have a proper play with it. I decided to swatch the shades and see what the pigmentation was like since I had so much luck with my e.l.f palette. Could I have yet another bargain gem on my hands?! I had to know.

The Immaculate Collection is currently the largest palette available from MUA. It contains 24 shades of eye shadow in several finishes and has a wide range of colours. The flip-top packaging is neat and secure but nothing special. I do love that it has a clear lid (like all MUA palettes) so that I can quickly see which colours I'm reaching for. It's easy to open and comes with a double ended sponge applicator which I don't tend to use. I keep them for absolute emergencies but they usually end up underneath sofas/beds/up the hoover. Oops. There are a lot of really pretty colours here and I was particularly excited about the various shades of blue because those colours were distinctly lacking in my elf palette. I swatched with no primer along each of the three rows.

 Row 1

Row 2

Row 3

I'm so sorry about my goosebumps. It was literally freezing in my house and I became a chicken the second I pushed my sleeve up. You can see it getting progressively worse with each picture.

But onto more important things... there are actually some really lovely shimmer shades here. I love the cool blues and the last shade is probably my favourite. It's this stunning purple base duochrome that shines electric blue. I can see it working well with a multitude of colours and I'm really excited to use it! The mattes were absolutely dire. Might as well not have been there. They were chalky, had no pigmentation and were impossible to work with. I was so disappointed! I know it's hard to get mattes right but I would have rather just had some more pretty shimmers to work with!  I'm also a little bit confused by the layout of this palette. I know it's a bit anal but I quite like my palettes to have some rhyme and reason and this had none. It's all a bit mishmash and strange. It's not at all bad for £8 though and there's usually some great offers on with MUA or at Superdrug where you can buy this palette. 

Final Verdict: A nice addiction to my collection of palettes and there are some gorgeous shimmers! A bit hit and miss.

What do you think to this palette? Do you have a holy grail palette that you recommend?

Lauren

e.l.f Studio 100 Piece Eyeshadow Palette Swatches

I've been thinking about doing this post for a while and bottling out because I'm lazy and 100 is a big number in swatches! But I finally decided that today was the day. I literally have infinity time at the minute since I finished my job yesterday (absolutely heartbroken in case you were wondering) and thought that this is the ideal occasion! I struggled to find a full set of swatches online when I was considering purchasing this with a lot of bloggers obviously citing time as the restriction for swatching every single shadow. I actually really enjoyed this in the end and found it quite relaxing, plus it's great to have a personal colour reference. It can be a bit overwhelming when you're looking into the palette and I often find myself reaching for my small palettes because the choice is easier. Well not any more! This is the original palette, there is also a version with some marble shadows in it. If you fancy a look at that, Alessandra from Cakes, Cupcakes and Cosmetics has swatched them here.

 I decided to swatch up each column since that's how the colours are laid out, so I have 10 pictures of 10 swatches each, starting from the bottom left of the palette, going by columns. I hope that's not too complicated! By the way, you definitely need to click on the images for a closer look, they're pretty darn good.

 This is essentially a row of really pretty highlight shades. The middle 3 don't really show up on my skin but I don't see that as a negative. I tend to use shades like this a lot to even out the colour of my lids.

Look at these! Aren't they stunning? Beautiful warm toned peach/copper shades. And I love the canary yellow shimmer (9)

The first shade in this column is a stand out for me. It's this gorgeous dark forest green with a slight gold shimmer. Utterly divine. So many lovely green shades here, I love the military olives and the neon brightness of the 8th shade.

These are gorgeous colours  but they definitely lean more purple or turquoise. I would have loved to see a really striking cobalt.

 One of my favourite rows. Deep raspberries and shimmering pinks.

This is a bit of an odd one. There are some pretty violet shades but also a nice mix of deep neutrals. Interesting combination.

 Go-to taupes and browns. Perfect every day eyes.

Look at that red! It's everything I wanted from Central in the Sleek Glory Palette. Central was great but a bit on the chalky side. This colour is beeeeautiful. Also some gorgeous oranges and mid-tone pinks. Perfect for warm shadow lovers like myself.

Lovely mix of deep browns and shimmery taupes.

And last but not least - Greys and silvers. There wasn't actually a true black in the palette. This isn't an issue for me personally since I have black shadows in my Sleek palettes, but I do feel like it should have been included.

And now for the big reveal... this was all done without any primer. You read that right, none at all. Aren't they amazing?! I have actually fallen in love with this palette and am astounded by the colour pay off. Some of the more matte colours are a little chalky and harder to work with but still very usable. All of the colours were soft and whilst there was some fall out, it wasn't deal breaking. This palette usually retails for £15 from the e.l.f UK website but e.l.f so often have massive deals on and I actually got this for £7.50 which is just incredible. So happy I made the leap, it was totally worth it.

If you fancy seeing what else I picked up from e.l.f during their sale click here.

Have you tried this palette? And which is your favourite row of colours?

Lauren