review: ud naked basics palette

another review of the naked basics palette! because there aren't enough out there! yeah, right. =P as many probably already know, this is urban decay's new matte palette, for the naked line. two of the shades, foxy and walk of shame (w.o.s.) are repeats. foxy is in the naked2 palette and walk of shame, in the 6-pan build your own palette. the palette itself is coated in a rubberized texture but not to the point where it will have things sticking to it or the coating will come off when scratched. maybe it's the same texture as the vice palette? i don't have it, i'm not sure. it is about the size of an iphone 4; it's smaller than my 5. next to the 5, if you hold it aligned with the bottom of the phone, it reaches the top of the screen. one complaint about this palette is that the naked and naked2 each came with a brush and an eye primer or lip gloss, and have 12 shadow pans each, at $50 each. naked basics has 6 pans, is $27, and is just the palette; no primer, no brush, no-nothing! annnnd in the midst of everything; the naked basics did not sell out on the first wave, unlike last year's naked2--which sold out on the second and few successive waves. basically; the week that this palette was released, it was announced that l'oreal was buying urban decay. the beauty community's problem: l'oreal does animal testing, urban decay does not. even though ud assured all of their die-hard fans that they will continue to not test on animals, the fans were pretty upset that their new parent company does, and a good number of them are basically boycotting now. we'll see what happens with that i guess.

anyway, back to the palette. venus is a pretty, shimmery ivory. yes it's a matte palette, they call this a "demi-matte"... it's nice to put in the inner corner to brighten it up. for me, foxy and walk of shame are highlighters or clean-up shades--for lighter skin tones. they're great to lighten up an area or to help blend out a harsh or dark shadow mistake. annnnd you can't see either of them on me. lol! naked2 is a really nice, light taupe color and looks great on skin tones across the board. faint is a medium brown and a great transitioning color. crave is a browned black (compared to my other black shadows; like ud blackout and thebalm serious). it is very dark and unless you hold it up to other blacks, you won't notice that it's brown-toned. i'm not sure how often i'd use this as i'm not a huge into smokey on myself, but it's a great color to set eyeliner.

swatches over ud original eye primer

the verdict: overall, i really do like this palette. like i said above, i do think they should have included something else with this palette, considering the price and what they've done for the other naked palettes.

~Lin-chan ^.~