Why I Sold My Urban Decay Naked Heat Palette!

So the Urban Decay Naked Heat palette comes back on sale tomorrow and I know so many of you will be itching to get your hands on it if you didn’t last time. As far as i’m aware, this is the first time Urban Decay have done two sale slots and I definitely fell for the idea of getting something that was going to be limited edition for a while. I was one of the lucky few who managed to grab one of the palettes in the original sale but once it arrived I was slightly underwhelmed. I thought I’d let you know why I sold it to help you make your mind up on whether you really need it tomorrow!

Packaging:

The packaging of this palette cannot be sniffed at, it is simply gorgeous! It’s a robust plastic casing that’s very similar to the Naked Smoky palette and has a lovely fire-like feel to it. The colours are synonymous of the eye shadow shades inside and I just felt they’d completely nailed it with this one. I’ve never had a palette with packaging this bold and it definitely stood out for me compared to the other palettes I own. It comes with a double ended brush like all of the Naked palettes and a huge mirror on the inside too. Although the brush is a nice addition, I always feel like the cut of the bristles is not quite right. One end is more of a pencil brush and the other is meant to be a blending/crease brush. For me the pencil brush end is too big for under the lash line but too small for packing on colour. The blending end has too stiff bristles for use in the crease but I’m not sure what else this shape could do. I’ve found this to be the same with the majority of brushes that come with palettes though so it wasn’t a complete surprise, nor was I overly disappointed.

Shade Range:

This is where the palette fell down for me. I know it’s obviously a completely warm-toned palette and as a lover of those shades, that’s why I bought it. However, a lot of the colours are very very similar. To say there’s 12 shades inside, at least 5 of them could be used interchangeably! They are all a mid-toned orange-brown that do look different in the pan but on the eyes are nearly identical! When spending nearly £40 on a palette I’d quite like there to be unique shades rather than ones that are only very slightly different from each other.  In the pan I feel they look so vibrant and all the shades look so different but when applied on the eye they all kind of blend into one, and not in a good way! The shades Lumbre, He Devil, Dirty Talk, Scorched and Cayenne were the worst offenders for me! But Sauced and Low Blow are also almost identical, as are Ounce and Chaser.

For me, I felt like the shades could all be found very easily in other palettes and if you own the Morphe 35O palette then this doesn’t even get a look in! The 35O in my opinion has bolder pops of colour and the sheer quantity of colours means you can vary your looks up more. In my opinion, the Naked Heat palette has one look and you can’t really deviate from that. I tried to create different looks both times I used this palette and due to the similarity of the colours they ended up looking identical despite using completely different colours.

In the month or so that I owned this palette, I think I only reached for it a grand total of twice. It’s a real shame because I do love warm colours but I feel like these are definitely suited for someone just starting to experiment with warmer tones rather than a long standing fan! For nearly £40, I could not justify keeping a palette that I only reached for once in a blue moon. I didn’t even feel that there was one stand-out shade that made me want to reach for it or even keep it. It was just very lacklustre in the colour department for me!

Pigmentation & Blendability:

I’m going to put it out there, I was disappointed with the pigmentation. I just felt like they were all very muddy and didn’t pack the punch that I was after. I even tried the more glittery shades with fix plus and still found them to be lacking! I tried numerous different brushes to blend them out and apply them but nothing seemed to be working for me. They seemed to be a little patchy rather than the softly blown out effect I was looking for.

Initially, I thought I loved it, but when i’d ‘finished’ the look I was creating, I just felt like I needed to rummage through my dressing table looking for darker matte shades to finish the look off and a better highlight shade. The only real shade you could highlight with is Ounce and this did absolutely nothing for me and almost blended entirely away! This would have been better in a shimmer or glitter format rather than having two very similar light matte shades that you can’t do anything with really.  For me, the palette feels a little bit thrown together and a little bit more consideration regarding colours and finishes would definitely have made this a better palette for me!

I was really disappointed I didn’t love this palette as I adore Urban Decay and I love the Naked Palettes! However, I felt like this had not been as well thought out as other palettes and was missing a few key shades for my liking. Don’t get me wrong, this is not a bad palette, it’s nice and the colours are pretty, however its just not wow! Did you get your hands on the Naked Heat the first time around or are you going to be trying tomorrow?

Much Love

xoxo