Urban Decay Holiday 2014 offerings: Vice3 palette and Naked Illuminated powder in Aura

For this holiday season, Urban Decay released the third iteration of its classic Vice palette, as well as added a few new Naked products to its quickly growing popular products collection.

Urban Decay Vice3 palette

The Urban Decay Vice3 palette (C$70) is comprised of 20 exclusive, never -before-seen shades that are a mix of matte, shimmer, and metallic finishes. It is packaged in a plastic case with a super cool futuristic design on the cover. The palette comes stored in a zip purse that you can use to store the palette or anything you’d like. Included is also a double-ended brush that has a multi-purpose eye brush on one end and a crease brush on the other.

The palette contains a good mix of matte, shimmer, and metallic shades, as well as a nice mix of neutral and jewel tones. This is THE perfect travel palette because you can use the neutral shades during the day, and then add some pops of colour at night to spice up the eye look. There is also an even number of warm versus cool-toned shades, which is great for people like me with neutral skintones and can wear both warm and cool colours.

In terms of the quality of the powders, it may be because I haven’t played with Urban Decay eyeshadows in a while but I found the matte shades to be surprisingly dry and powdery, with a sizeable amount of powder flyaway. The metallic shades all swatched BEAUTIFULLY. Lucky, the middle shade in the 2nd row, swatched like liquid copper and it was incredibly smooth and pigmented. The shimmery shades are also smooth and pigmented, but definitely not as beautiful as the metallic shades.

Overall I think the palette is a nice to have, especially if you don’t have an all-in-one palette like this. The neutral tones in here are pretty disappointing, but the jewel tones shades quality definitely makes up for what is lacking in the neutrals. At the price of $70 though, you do have to evaluate whether or not having 1/3 of the palette be not-so-great quality is worth the price.

Swatches, in the order presented in the palette:

Urban Decay Naked Illuminated Powder in Aura

The Naked Illuminated Powder (C$35) is a face and powder shimmery powder highlighter. Its packaged in a paper box, which reminds me of the original Naked palette package, and also includes a synthetic hair fan brush for easy application. The shade Aura is a subtle pink-gold powder with lots of shimmer, and some white-pink glitter. The texture is powdery and slightly gritty, and the highlighting effect is very obvious. I found this to be almost too glittery to use on my face, but the highlighting effect on my shoulders, collarbone, and decollete was beautiful and gives off a natural glow.

I think the Naked Iluminated Powder is a good body highlighter, but I personally prefer my face highlighters to be more fine in shimmer, rather in glitter. If you are a fan of more intense shimmer/glitters in your highlighters, this one is the one for you! Otherwise, I recommend looking elsewhere.