I'm going to try to make this one mostly photos with few words. I will quell my usual long-windedness as best I can, but if anyone has questions about these palettes, I'm happy to say more.
I think everyone in the UK knows about these, but since most people who read here are from North America, I thought someone might find this interesting. These aren't available in North America, as far as I know, but at least once a year MUA has a free international shipping sale (ETA: sadly they don't do this anymore), and it is totally, totally worth taking advantage of that. International shipping is normally £7.50, which is about $13 at this point, so it's not cheap. Not exorbitant (like it would be to ship makeup from North America to the UK), but the free shipping sale still makes a significant difference, especially since the products themselves are really affordable. They just held that sale last month, so it might not come around again for a while. MUA palettes themselves are £4-6.
I bought the Smokin and Dusk til Dawn palettes in January. They are both excellent. The Smokin palette is clearly meant to dupe Urban Decay's Smoked palette. I'll write a post in future comparing the MUA shadows to UD's. Many of MUA's eyeshadow palettes seem to have been "inspired" by Urban Decay.
Enough talk. Let's look at the palettes. All of the swatches below were done without primer. Look how fucking impressive they are! I always use primer because of my oily lids - just imagine how much more brilliantly pigmented the swatches would be over primer. I wanted to give you the worst case scenario, the basic performance of these shadows, which is awesome on its own.
I've included photos taken with flash so that you can see the level of shimmer in each shade, since there's a range from completely matte to slightly shimmery to mattes with glitter to really fucking sparkly shadows.
Smokin
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| MUA Smokin Eyeshadow Palette |
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| MUA Smokin Eyeshadow Palette (with flash) |
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| Swatches of MUA Smokin Eyeshadow Palette (natural light) |
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| Swatches of MUA Smokin Eyeshadow Palette (flash) |
