Cult Status

I'm embarrassingly late to the party, but I finally managed to get my mitts on the much-hyped Urban Decay Naked Palette. I won't do any swatches because there's already about a thousand of them, but I will detail some first impressions. I do like the chocolate brown velvet exterior and gold embossing on the front, but not so much the cardboard interior, though it seems sturdy enough. The Shadow Karma Brush that came with the palette is surprisingly stiff and quite flat, so it looks useful for patting on a fine layer of shadow onto the lid, but not really for blending. Apparently the brush is $26 itself, which definitely is overpriced, but may be an added incentive to clinch the sale. Not that the palette isn't already impressively good value considering it consists of 12 full-sized eyeshadows (at 1.3g each), normally $17 each, as well as a mini Primer Potion. 

From only very lightly swatching the shadows onto my arm, I can say that the shimmery shades (Sidecar, Half Baked, Smog, Darkhorse, Toasted) are absolutely gorgeous and the palette is worth it just for them. The two highlight shades are pretty but I don't really see myself using them that much, except probably in the inner corner of the eye on the rare occasion. The two matte shades (Naked and Buck) are not as pigmented and in a palette of such gorgeous shades, I doubt I'd ever even use them beyond initial experimentation. The shade Naked is especially light and barely shows up as it's too close to the colour of my skin. Surprisingly, Creep, which I expected to be a rich, sparkling dark grey from the way it looked in the pan, was actually quite chalky and lacking pigmentation.

I purchased my Naked palette from BeautyBay.com at just under $60 including postage. There are websites which offer free shipping, however, after reading several reviews, I decided to pay a little extra for postage because comments about shipping from Beauty Bay seemed generally positive. I can say from my experience, shipping was fairly prompt and without complications (my order was despatched on 23 January and the package arrived 1 February). I just checked and Beauty Bay currently have a free shipping promotion. If only they sold Naked 2, I would've already surrendered my credit card deets.